Full text of "Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology by Peter Sloterdijk"

See other formats

Peter Sloterdijk

BUBBLES

SPHERES I

<e>

SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES

Originally published as Sphdren /. Bbsen by Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo¬
copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Semiotext(e)

2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057
www.scmiotexte.com

Special thanks to Marc Lowenthal and John Ebert.

Cover art by Eva Schlcgcl. Draft for Installation, MAK Vienna, 2010.

Design: Hedi El Kholti

ISBN: 978-1-58435-104-7

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, and London, England
Printed in the United States of America

SPHERES

VOLUME I: BUBBLES
MICROSPHEROLOGY

Peter Sloterdijk

Translated by Wieland Hoban

<e>

Contents

Preliminary Note 9

Introduction: The Allies; or. The Breathed Commune 17

Preliminary Reflections: Thinking the Interior 83

1. Heart Operation; or, On the Eucharistic Excess 101

2. Between Faces 139

On the Appearance of the Interfacial Intimate Sphere

3. Humans in the Magic Circle 207

On the Intellectual History of the Fascination with Closeness

Excursus 1: Thought Transmission 263

4. The Retreat Within the Mother 269

Groundwork for a Negative Gynecology

Excursus 2: Nobjects and Un-Relationships 291

On the Revision of Psychoanalytical Stage Theory

Excursus 3: The Egg Principle 323

Internalization and Encasement

Excursus 4: “In Dasein There Lies an Essential Tendency 333
towards Closeness.”

Heidegger’s Doctrine of Existential Place

5. The Primal Companion 343

Requiem for a Discarded Organ

Excursus 5: The Black Plantation 397

A Note on Trees of Life and Enlivenment Machines

6. Soul Partitions 413

Angels—Twins—Doubles

Excursus 6: Spheric Mourning 459

On Nobject Loss and the Difficulty of Saying What Is Missing

Excursus 7: On the Difference Between an Idiot and an Angel 471

7. The Siren Stage 477

On the First Sonospheric Alliance

Excursus 8: Illiterate Truths 521

A Note on Oral Fundamentalism

Excursus 9: Where Lacan Starts to Go Wrong 533

8. Closer to Me Than I Am Myself 539

A Theological Preparation for the Theory of the Shared Inside

Excursus 10: Matris in gremio 619

A Mariological Cricket

Transition: On Ecstatic Immanence 625

Notes 633

Photographic Credits

664

The difficulty that had to be overcome [.. J was to avoid all
geometrical evidence . In other words, I had to start with a
sort of intimacy of roundness .

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

PRELIMINARY NOTE

Tradition has it that Plato put an inscription at the entrance
in his academy, reading: “Let no one enter who is not a geo¬
metrician.” Were these arrogant words? A declaration of war
on the vulgar mind? Undoubtedly; for it was not without reason
that a new form of elitism was invented at the academy. For
one amazing moment, the school and the avant-garde were
identical. Avant-gardism is the skill of forcing all members of
;t society to make a decision about a suggestion that has not
come from them. It was Socrates who first went about this
game seriously, and Plato escalated the philosophical provocation
by elevating the compulsion to choose between knowledge
and nonknowledge to a higher authority. In shutting out the
ageometric rabble and only admitting candidates equipped
with the appropriate knowledge, he challenged all mortals to
qualify themselves for access to his research community by
showing the necessary credentials. Here one must bear in
mind: what are humans in the academic age but forgetful
mammals that have, in most cases, merely forgotten that they
are geometricians at heart? A geometrician—what is that? An
intelligence coming from the world of the dead, bringing

vague memories with it of a stay in a perfect sphere. Exoteri-
cally effective philosophy begins by splitting society into
those who remember and those who do not—and, further¬
more, into those who remember a particular thing and those
who remember something else. That has remained its business
to this day, even if the criteria for the division have become a
little more complicated.

Like any author who has come a little way since his magical
beginnings, I am aware that it is impossible to restrict the uses
to which the literate community puts published writings to
one single perspective in advance. Nonetheless, it strikes me as
useful to point out that the following reflections, in their general
outlines, are probably best read as a radicalization of Plato’s
motto. I would not only set Plato’s statement above the gate to
an academy, but above the gate to life itself—were it not such
an inappropriate idea to adorn the doorway to the light of the
world, which is already too narrow, with warning signs... We
appeared in life with no prior geometric schooling, and no
philosophy can subject us to an entrance examination after the
fact. This does not alter the exclusive mandate of philosophy
in the slightest, however, because the assumption that we are
given the world only through innate geometric prejudices cannot
simply be dismissed. Could one not hold the view that life is a
constant a posteriori testing of our knowledge about the space
from which everything emanates? And the splitting of society
into those who know something about this and those who
know nothing—does it not extend deeper in the present than
ever before?

Life is a matter of form—that is the hypothesis we associate
with the venerable philosophical and geometric term 'sphere.”

TO / bubbles

Ii suggests that life, the formation of spheres and thinking are
different expressions for the same thing. Referring to a vital
spheric geometry is only productive, however, if one concedes
the existence of a form of theory that knows more about life
than life itself does—and that wherever human life is found,
whether nomadic or settled, inhabited orbs appear, wandering
or stationary orbs which, in a sense, are rounder than anything
that can be drawn with compasses. The following books are
devoted to the attempt to probe the possibilities and boundaries
of geometric vitalism.

A rather extravagant configuration of theory and life, one
must admit. The hubris of this angle may become more bearable,
or at least understandable, if one remembers that there was a
second inscription above the entrance to the academy, occult
and humorous, stating that whoever was unwilling to become
entangled in love affairs with other visitors in the garden of
theory should keep away. One can already sense it: this motto
too must be applied to life as a whole. Whoever has no interest
in sphere formation must naturally avoid amorous dramas,
and whoever steers clear of eros excludes themselves from the
efforts to understand the vital form. And so the hubris
changes camps: the exclusivity of philosophy is expressed not
in its own presumptuousness, but in the self-gratification of
those who are certain of being able to dispense with philo¬
sophical thought. If philosophy is exclusive, it mirrors most
peoples self-exclusion from the best—in exaggerating the
existing division in society, however, it creates an awareness of
these exclusions and puts them to the vote again. Philosophical
exaggeration provides an opportunity to revise completed
options and decide against exclusion. Hence philosophy, if it

Prelim rary Note / 11

is sufficiently focused on its task, is always also self-advertiser
ment. If others see something else as the best, and achieve
something convincing as a result, then so much the better.

The present attempt, as one can see, declares its concern
with reference to a Platonic problem; it does not view itself as
part of Platonism, however, assuming the latter means the
sum of misguided readings that have made the founder of the
Athenian academy an object of debate throughout the ages*—
including the anti-Platonism extending from Kant to
Heidegger and their successors. I will only remain on the trail
of Platonic references in the sense that I will develop, more
obstinately than usual, the hypothesis that love stories are stories
of form, and that every act of solidarity is an act of sphere for¬
mation, that is to say the creation of an interior.

The surpluses of first love, once it breaks away from its
origins to make its own fresh starts elsewhere, also feed philo¬
sophical thought—which, we must above all remember, is a
case of transference love for the whole. Unfortunately, many
of those active in the current intellectual discourse have con¬
tented themselves with characterizing the phenomenon of
transference love as a neurotic mechanism that is to blame for
genuine passions being felt in the wrong places most of the
time. Nothing has harmed philosophical thought more than
this pitiful reduction of motives, which has sought to validate
itself—rightly and wrongly—through psychoanalytical models.
Rather, one must insist that transference is the formal source
of the creative processes that inspire the exodus of humans
into the open. We do not so much transfer incorrigible
affects onto unknown persons as early spatial experiences to
new places, and primary movements onto remote locations.

12 / Bubbles

The limits of my capacity for transference are the limits of
my world.

11 I had to place a sign of my own at the entrance to this
trilogy, it would he this: let no one enter who is unwilling to
praise transference and to refute loneliness.

PreUmrarv Note 1 13

SPHERES

VOLUME 1: BUBBLES
MICROSPHEROLOGY

INTRODUCTION

The Allies;

Or, The Breathed Commune

The child stands enraptured on the balcony, holding its new
present and watching the soap bubbles float into the sky as it
blows them out of the little loop in front of his mouth. Now a
swarm of bubbles erupts upwards, as chaotically vivacious as a
throw of shimmering blue marbles. Then, at a subsequent
attempt, a large oval balloon, filled with timid life, quivers off
the loop and floats down to the street, carried along by the
breeze. It is followed by the hopes of the delighted child, floating
out into the space in its own magic bubble as if, for a few seconds,
its fate depended on that of the nervous entity. When the
bubble finally bursts after a trembling, drawn-out flight, the
soap bubble artist on the balcony emits a sound that is at once a
sigh and a cheer. For the duration of the bubbles life the blower
was outside himself, as if the little orbs survival depended on
remaining encased in an attention that floated out with it. Any
lack of accompaniment, any waning of that solidary hope and
anxiety would have damned the iridescent object to premature
failure. But even when, immersed in the eager supervision of its
creator, it was allowed to drift through space for a wonderful
while, it still had to vanish into nothingness in the end. In the

place where the orb burst, the blowers excorporated soul was
left alone for a moment, as if it had embarked on a shared expe¬
dition only to lose its partner halfway. But the melancholy lasts
no more than a second before the joy of playing returns with its
time-honored cruel momentum. What are broken hopes but
opportunities for new attempts? The game continues tirelessly,
once again the orbs float from on high, and once again the
blower assists his works of art with attentive joy in their flight
through the delicate space. At the climax, when the blower is as
infatuated with his orbs as if they were self-worked miracles, the
erupting and departing soap bubbles are in no danger of perishing
prematurely for lack of rapturous accompaniment. The little
wizard s attention follows their trail and flies out into the open,
supporting the thin walls of the breathed bodies with its eager
presence. There is a solidarity between the soap bubble and its
blower that excludes the rest of the world. And each time the
shimmering entities drift into the distance, the little artist exits
his body on the balcony to be entirely with the objects he has
called into existence. In the ecstasy of attentiveness, the child’s
consciousness has virtually left its corporeal source. While
exhaled air usually vanishes without a trace, the breath encased
in these orbs is granted a momentary afterlife. While the bubbles
move through space, their creator is truly outside himself—with
them and in them. In the orbs, his exhaled air has separated
from him and is now preserved and carried further; at the same
time, the child is transported away from itself by losing itself in
the breathless co-flight of its attention through the animated
space. For its creator, the soap bubble thus becomes the medium
of a surprising soul expansion. The bubble and its blower coexist
in a field spread out through attentive involvement. The child

16 / bJwb tfc:

that follows its soap bubbles into the open is no Cartesian sub¬
ject, remaining planted on its extensionless thought-point while
observing an extended thing on its course through space* In
enthusiastic solidarity with his iridescent globes, the experi¬
menting player plunges into the open space and transforms the
/.one between the eye and the object into an animated sphere.
All eyes and attention, the childs face opens itself up to the
space in front of it. Now the playing child imperceptibly gains
an insight in the midst of its joyful entertainment that it will
later forget under the strain of school: that the spirit, in its own
way, is in space. Or perhaps one should say that when people
referred in former times to “spirit,” what they meant was always
inspired spatial communities? As soon as one begins making
concessions to such suspicions, it becomes natural to investigate
further in the same direction: if the child breathes its air into the
soap bubbles and remains loyal by following them with its ecstatic
gaze—who previously placed their breath into the child? Who
remains loyal to the child upon its own exodus from the nursery?
I n what attentions, what spaces of animation will the children
remain contained if their lives on ascending paths succeed? Who
will accompany the young ones on their way to things and their
epitome, the divided world? Is there someone, under all those
circumstances, whose ecstasy the children will be when they
float out into the space of possibility—and what will happen to
those who are nobodys exhalation? Indeed, does all life that
emerges and goes its own separate way remain contained in an
accompanying breath? Is it legitimate to imagine that every¬
thing which exists and becomes relevant is someone's concern?
The need is a familiar one, in fact—Schopenhauer called it the
metaphysical one—the need for all things belonging to the world

Introduction / “‘9

or being as a whole to be contained in a breath like an indelible
purpose. Can this need be satisfied? Can it be justified? Who
first had the thought that the world is nothing but the soap
bubble of an all-encompassing breath? Whose being-outside-
oneself would everything that is the case then be?

The thought of the Modern Age, which presented itself for so
long under the naive name of “Enlightenment” and the even
more naive programmatic word “progress,” is characterized by
an innate movement: wherever it follows its typical forward
motion, it achieves the breakthrough of the intellect out of the
caves of human illusion into the nonhuman world outside. It is
no coincidence that the cosmological turn named after Coper¬
nicus marks the start of the newer history of knowledge and
disappointment. It brought the people of the First World the
loss of the cosmological center, and subsequently set off an age
of progressive decentralizations. From that point on, earths
citizens, the old mortals, could bid farewell to all illusions about
their position in the lap of the cosmos, even if such ideas cling
to us like inborn illusions. Copernicus’ heliocentric theory ini¬
tiated a series of research eruptions into the deserted outer
reaches, extending to the inhumanly remote galaxies and the
most ghostly components of matter. The cold new breath from
outside was sensed early on, and a number of the pioneers of the
revolutionarily changed knowledge about the position of the
earth in space did not conceal their unease in the infinity now
imposed on them; thus even Kepler objected to Brunos doctrine
of the endless universe with the words that “this very cogitation
carries with it I don’t know what secret, hidden horror; indeed
one finds oneself wandering in this immensity, to which are

Circle without Constructor I, solar quake: the spreading waves reach a size corre¬
sponding to ten times the earths diameter, photographed by the space probe SOHO

denied limits and center and therefore all determinate places.” 1
Evasions to the outermost realms were followed by irruptions of
coldness from the cosmic and technical ice worlds into the
human inner sphere. Since the start of the Modern Age, the
human world has constantly—every century, every decade,
every year and every day—had to learn to accept and integrate
new truths about an outside not related to humans. From the
seventeenth century on, starting with the European educated
classes and increasingly affecting the informed masses of the
First World, the new psycho-cosmologically relevant sentiment
spread that humans were not the concern of evolution, the
indifferent goddess of becoming. Every view into the earthly

Iriroduction / 21

Circle without Constructor II, cartwheel galaxy in the Sculptor constellation,
photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope

factory and the extraterrestrial spaces provided increasing evidence
that mankind is towered above on all sides by monstrous exter¬
nalities that breathe on it with stellar coldness and extra-human
complexity. The old nature of homo sapiens is not up to these
provocations by the outside. Research and the raising of con¬
sciousness have turned man into the idiot of the cosmos; he has
sent himself into exile and expatriated himself from his
immemorial security in self-blown bubbles of illusions into a
senseless, unrelated realm that functions on its own. With the
help of its relentlessly probing intelligence, the open animal tore
down the roof of its old house from the inside. Taking part in
modernity means putting evolved immune systems at risk. Since
the English physicist and cosmographer Thomas Digges proved
in the 1670s that the two-thousand-year doctrine of the celestial
domes was both physically unfounded and thought-economi-
cally superfluous, the citizens of the Modern Age inevitably
found themselves in a new situation that not only shattered the
illusion of their homes central position in space, but also
deprived them of the comforting notion that the earth is
enclosed by spherical forms like warming heavenly mantles.
Since then, modern people have had to learn how one goes
about existing as a core without a shell; Pascal’s pious and obser¬
vant statement “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills
me with dread” formulates the intimate confession of an epoch. 2
Since the times became new in the precise sense, being-in-the-
world has meant having to cling to the earths crust and praying
to gravity—beyond any womb or shell. It cannot be mere coin¬
cidence: since the 1490s, those Europeans who sensed what had
to be done have built and examined ball-shaped images of earth,
globes, like possessed members of some undefined cult, as if the

ln:-oduction /23

sight of these fetishes was to console them for the fact that they
would exist for all eternity only on a ball, but no longer inside a
ball. We will show that everything referred to as “globalization”
today comes from this play with the eccentric ball. Friedrich
Nietzsche, the master formulator of the truths one cannot live
with, but cannot ignore without intellectual dishonesty, finally
articulated what the world as a whole had to accept becoming
for the modem entrepreneurs: “a gate to a thousand deserts,
empty and cold.” 3 Living in the Modern Age means paying the
price for shellessness. The peeled human being acts out its
epochal psychosis by replying to external cooling with warming
technologies and climate policies—or with climate technologies
and warming policies. But now that Gods shimmering bubbles,
the celestial domes, have burst, who could have the power to
create prosthetic husks around those who have been exposed?

To oppose the cosmic frost infiltrating the human sphere
through the open windows of the Enlightenment, modern
humanity makes use of a deliberate greenhouse effect: it
attempts to balance out its shellessness in space, following the
shattering of the celestial domes, through an artificial civilizatory
world. This is the final horizon of Euro-American technological
titanism. From this perspective, the Modern Age appears as the age
of an oath sworn in offensive desperation: that a comprehensive
house-building operation for the species and a policy of global
warming must be successful faced with the open, cold and
silent sky. It is above all the entrepreneurial nations of the First
World that have translated their acquired psycho-cosmological
restlessness into offensive constructivism. They protect them¬
selves from the terror of the bottomless, of the infinitely
expanded space, through the utopian yet pragmatic erection of

24 / Bi.-’Db.tfi*

a global greenhouse intended to offer modern living in the
open. That is why the further the process of globalization pro¬
ceeds, the more one ultimately finds people looking at the
sky—by day or by night—indifferently and distractedly; in
fact, it has almost become a sign of naivete to continue pursuing
cosmological questions with existential pathos. By contrast,
the certainty that there is nothing more to look for up there is
in keeping with the spirit of advanced circumstances. For it is
not cosmology that tells people today where they stand, but
rather the general theory of immune systems. What makes the
Modern Age special is that after the turn to the Copernican
world, the sky as an immune system was suddenly useless. 4
Modernity is characterized by the technical production of its
immunities and the increasing removal of its safety structures
from the traditional theological and cosmological narratives.
Industrial-scale civilization, the welfare state, the world market
and the media sphere: all these large-scale projects aim, in a
shelless time, for an imitation of the now impossible, imagi¬
nary spheric security. Now networks and insurance policies are
meant to replace the celestial domes; telecommunication has
to reenact the all-encompassing. The body of humanity seeks
to create a new immune constitution in an electronic medial
skin. Because the old all-encompassing and containing struc¬
ture, the heavenly continens firmament, is irretrievably lost,
that which is no longer encompassed and no longer contained,
the former contentum , must now create its own satisfaction on
artificial continents under artificial skies and domes. 5 Those
who help to build the global civilization greenhouse, however,
become entangled in thermo-political paradoxes: to achieve its
creation—and this spatial fantasy underlies the globalization

hlrooucnon i 25

project—enormous populations, at the center as well as the
margins, must be evacuated from their old casing of temperate
regional illusion and exposed to the frosts of freedom. Here
total constructivism unbendingly demands its price. To free up
ground for the artificial surrogate sphere, the leftovers of faith
in inner worlds and the fiction of security are being destroyed
in all old countries in the name of a thoroughgoing market
enlightenment that promises a better life, yet initially lowers the
immune standards of the proletariats and marginal peoples to a
devastating degree. Dumbfounded masses soon find themselves
in the open, without ever receiving a proper explanation of their
evacuations purpose. Disappointed, cold and abandoned, they
wrap themselves in surrogates of older conceptions of the
world, as long as these still seem to hold a trace of the warmth
of old human illusions of encompassedness.

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its
sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to?
Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And
backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still
an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an
infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it
got colder? 6

These questions open up the yawning abyss that current dis¬
courses on globalization ignore in their industrious hysteria. In
shelless times, without spatial orientation and overwhelmed by
their own progress, those living in modernity suddenly had to
become splendid people by the masses. One can view techno-

26 / LiLCtei

logical civilization, in particular its accelerations in the twenti¬
eth century, as an attempt to drown the questions of
Nietzsches chief witness, the tragic Diogenes, in comfort. By
making technical living tools of unknown perfection available to
individuals, the modern world aims thus to silence their uneasy
inquiries about the space in which they live, or from which they
constantly fall And yet it was precisely existentialist modernity
that identified the reasons why it is less important for people to
know who they are than where they are. As long as intelligence
is scaled up by banality, people are not interested in their place,
which seems given; they fix their imaginations on the ghost
lights that appear to them in the form of names, identities and
business. What recent philosophers have termed forgetfulness of
being [Seinsvergessenheit] is most evident as an obstinate willful
ignorance of the mysterious place of existence. The popular plan
to forget both oneself and being is realized through a deliberate
nonawareness of the ontological situation. This willfulness is
currently fuelling all forms of rapid living, civil disinterestedness
and anorganic eroticism. It drives its agents to limit themselves
to small, malicious arithmetic units; the greedy of recent days no
longer ask where they are as long as they are allowed to be
someone, anyone. If, by contrast, we are here attempting to
pose the question of “where?” anew in a radical fashion, that
means restoring to contemporary thought its feeling for
absolute localization, and with it the feeling for the basis of the
difference between small and large.

It is possible to give a competent contemporary reply to the
Gnostically inspired question “where are we if we are in the
world?” We are in an outside that carries inner worlds. With the

intiooL.ction / 27

hypothesis of the priorness of the outside in mind, we no longer
need to undertake any naive investigations into mankind s posi¬
tion in the cosmos. It is too late to dream ourselves back to a
place under celestial domes whose interiors would permit
domestic feelings of order. That security in the largest circle has
been destroyed for those in the know, along with the old homely,
immunizing cosmos itself. Whoever still wished to look outwards
and upwards would find themselves in a space devoid of humans
and remote from the earth, with no relevant boundaries. Even on
the smallest material level, complexities have been revealed in
which we are the ones who are excluded and remote. Thus an
inquiry into our location is more productive than ever, as it
examines the place that humans create in order to have some¬
where they can appear as those who they are. Here, following a
venerable tradition, this place bears the name “sphere.” The
sphere is the interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by
humans—in so far as they succeed in becoming humans.
Because living always means building spheres, both on a small
and a large scale, humans are the beings that establish globes and
look out into horizons. Living in spheres means creating the
dimension in which humans can be contained. Spheres are
immune-systemically effective space creations for ecstatic beings
that are operated upon by the outside.

28 / dubokjs

The vessels thus filled with You do not render You any support:
for though they perished utterly, You would not be spilt out.
And in pouring Yourself out upon us. You do not come down
to us but rather elevate us to You: You are not scattered over
us, but we are gathered into one by You.

— Saint Augustine, Confessions , Book I, III 7

Among the outdated and valuable expressions that metaphysics
used, in its time, to build subtle bridges between heaven and
earth, there is one that still comes to the aid of some contem¬
poraries—and not only artists and their imitators—when faced
with the problem of finding a respectable name for the source of
their ideas and inventions: inspiration. Even if the word seems
antiquated, and sooner earns its users a smile than recognition,
it has not entirely lost its symbolic radiance. It is still vaguely
suitable for marking the unclearly different, heterotopic origin
of those ideas and works which cannot simply be attributed to
the application of rules and the technical repetition of familiar
searching and finding patterns. Whoever invokes inspiration

admits that creative ideas are nontrivial events whose occurrence
cannot be forced* Its medium is not its master, and its recipient
is not its producer. Whether it is genius that whispers the idea
to its executor or chance that makes the dice fall as they do,
whether it is a rupture in the usual conceptual fabric that
leads to the articulation of thoughts never thought before, or
whether a productive error results in the new: whatever powers
are considered possible transmitters of the inspired idea, the
receiver always knows that in a sense, beyond their own efforts,
they have housed visitors from elsewhere in their thought,
Inspiration—breathing life into something, intuition, the
instantaneous appearance of the idea or a gaping open of the
new: in former times, when it could still be used without irony,
the concept referred to the fact that an informing power superior
in nature makes a human consciousness its mouthpiece or
sounding board* Heaven, metaphysicians would say, appears as
the earths informant and gives its sign; something foreign passes
through the door of the own and acquires validity. And although
the foreign no longer bears any lofty, concisely metaphysical
name today—not Apollo, not Yahwe, not Gabriel, not Krishna
and not Xango—the phenomenon of the inspired idea has not
disappeared entirely from enlightened fields of view. Whoever
experiences inspired ideas can, even in post-metaphysical or
hetero-metaphysical times, understand themselves as a host or
matrix for the non-own. It is only with reference to such passings-
through by the foreign that a tenable concept of what
subjectivity could mean can be articulated in our times. Cer¬
tainly the entering visitors have become anonymous today. Even
if, as the joke goes, one is often surprised to which people the
ideas choose to occur: no one who is familiar with the process

30 / B'Myrjo

need doubt their sudden arrival. Where they appear, one
acknowledges their presence without any closer concern for
iheir provenance. Whatever enters the imagination is not
supposed to come from anywhere except somewhere over there,
from without, from an open field that is not necessarily a
yonder realm. People no longer want to receive their inspired
ideas from some embarrassing heavens; they are supposed to
come from the no mans land of ownerless, precise thoughts.
Through their lack of a sender, they permit the free use of their
gift. The inspired idea that delivers something for you remains a
discreet visitor at the door. It makes no religion of itself, in so
far as such a religion always involves fealty to its founders name.
Its antonym, which many rightly find beneficial, creates one of
the preconditions for finally asking today, in general terms,
about the nature of what we call media. Media theory: what is
it, practiced lege artis , 8 other than the conceptual work to sup¬
plement regular visits both discreet and indiscreet? Messages,
senders, channels, languages—these are the basic concepts,
frequently misunderstood, of a general science of visitability of
something by something in something. We will show that media
theory and sphere theory converge; this is a hypothesis for
whose proof three books cannot be excessive. In spheres, shared
inspirations become the reason for the possibility of humans
existing together in communes and peoples. The first thing that
develops within them is that strong relationship between
humans and their motives of animation—and animations are
visits that remain—which provide the reason for solidarity.

The primal scene for what, in the Judeo-Christian tradition,
deserves to be called inspiration, is the creation of humans—an

Intraaucuon / 31

event that appears in the Genesis account in two versions: once
as the finaJ act of the six-day work of creation, though it passes
over the life-breathing scene in silence, and once as the initia¬
tory act for all further creation, but now with an explicit
emphasis on creation through breath and with the characteristic
distinction of clay modeling in the first case and breathing in
the second. Here the reader of Genesis encounters the inspirator,
the Lord of Creation, as a figure with a sharp ontological pro¬
file: He is the first producer with complete authority. The
creature into which He breathes life, for its part, appears on the
stage of existence as the first human being, the prototype of a
species that can experience inspired ideas. The biblical account
of the first breath reproduces the original visit of the spirit to a
host medium.

When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens—and
no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no
plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had
not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the
ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the
whole surface of the ground—the Lord God formed the
man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nos¬
trils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
(Genesis 2:4—7) 9

Would it be possible to speak of this breath in a language not yet
molded into formulas by theologians’ routines and pious subor¬
dinations to its supposed and prescribed meaning? If one takes
seriously these lines that have been parroted, interpreted, trans¬
lated and exploited ten thousand times as a statement about a

32 / BJoUes

production process, the explicit succession they describe reveals
above all a procedural insight: man is an artificial entity that
could only be created in two installments. In the first stage of
the work process, as we read, the creator forms Adam—the clay
creature taken from the soil, adama —and molds him into a
work of art unlike any other that, like all products of artifice,
owes its existence to the combination of artistic knowledge and
raw material. Craft and earth are equally necessary to erect the
image of man in the form of the first statue. Hence, in His ini¬
tial access, the creator is no more than a potter who enjoys using
suitable starting material to form a figure that resembles Him¬
self, the producing master. Whoever wishes to imagine humans
as primitive machines finds here an early model of how to create
statues, human dolls, golems, robots, android illusions and the
like according to the rules of art. The God of the first phase of
human creation embodies a representative of the oldest techno¬
logical culture, whose main emphasis is on ceramic skills. It was
the potters who first discovered that earth is more than simply
farmland to be cultivated. The ceramist as an early creator of
works or demiurge has the experience to know that the ground
which bears fruit can also be raw material for clay vessels to
which form , clarity in conjunction with stability, is lent in work¬
shops and ovens. If the Lord of Genesis began the creation of
humans as a potter, it was because this creation succeeds most
plausibly when it begins as the production of vessels. Being able
to make android creatures according to ceramic routines: at the
time of the biblical Genesis, this marked the state of art. Hence
there is nothing unusual about Adams body being manufac¬
tured from clay. It is initially no more than a hollow-bodied
sculpture awaiting significant further use. Only then does the

Hrooue: cn / 33

Neolithic reconstruction of a head through the application of dyed plasLcr, which
gave the skull the form of the layers of tissue that had once existed

extraordinary dement come into play, for if the clay creature is
made hollow in its original modeling, it is only because it is
henceforth to serve as a jug of life. It is formed as a semi-solid
figure from the start, as its creator has a special sort of filling in
mind. Metaphysics begins as metaceramics, for the substance to
be filled into this singular vessel will be no merely physical
content. Though liquids can be taken up by the vase android in

■* [«> < uLv^L)o

Life-size clay figures from the burial complex of Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BC),
first Emperor of China

limited amounts, its hollow space is of a more sublime nature,
not suitable for being lined with sensual fluids. The Adamic
vessel is created with cavities that only awaken to their true
purpose in a second, initially very mysterious phase of creation:
“...and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man
became a living being/*

ln:roduotion / 36

With this act of inspiration, the second phase of the pro¬
duction of humans asserts its rights. Without the completion of
the clay body through breath, Adam would forever have
remained merely a bizarre work of earthen art; he would be no
more than a willful installation on the untended earth. Such a
statue would perhaps have been adequate as a burial gift for its
producer, comparable to clay figures in the graves of ancient
Chinese aristocrats; from a craftsmans perspective this Adam, at
least in his upper parts, may have resembled his presumed tech¬
nical models: the ancient Palestinian head sculptures produced
through the application of a lifelike clay or plaster finish to
skulls of the dead. 10 The account in Genesis, read outside of
theological conventions, suggests that the semi-finished
Adamitic products were given their decisive pneumatic value in
a second operation. The implicit lesson is that man is a vascular
creature, and only awakens to its destiny of being an “image”
through a specific supplement. The Hebrew text refers to the
living being with the word ntfe$h> which means something like
“that which is animated by a living breath”; according to
Hebrew scholars, this is largely synonymous with ruach ,
meaning “moving air, breath, breath of life, spirit, feeling and
passion, thought.” A two-phase process in procedural terms, this
anthropopoiesis escalates from the creation of vessels to the
creation of spirit beings, with this climax intended from the
start; the breathing-in of life is not simply an ornamental
supplement to an autonomous bodily massif. That is why each
phase of the creation act has its own individual, resolutely
technical character: if Adam, as the Genesis account purports, is
to be understood in every respect as the creature or work of a
creator—as a factum or ens creatum , the Latin patres would say—

36 / dutxtes

then the divine power of creation must expressly encompass the
task of producing beings that are fully animated, ontologically
complete, intelligently active, equipped with subjectivity and,
by virtue of all this, godlike.

Thus the Genesis account breaks open the horizon of the
technical question with the last possible radicality: what tech¬
nology is can henceforth only be understood by measuring the
distance between what God was capable of in illo tempore and
what humans will, in time, themselves be capable of. The first
part of producing the human image is, as we have seen, no
mystery with regard to humanity’s divine maker, and humans
have successfully repeated it under suitable conditions. The
belief that the production of human images can be learned and
mastered forms the basis for all master classes in nature studies
at traditional art academies. The artificer from the first phase of
creation would be no more than an art student noted for his
talent in a nude painting class; he would simply be an applier of
learnable arts. The second part, on the other hand, requires a
thoroughly postgraduate trick that none but the God of Genesis
have performed thus far: this addition tears the divide between
human technology and theotechnology wide open. For, from a
demiurgic perspective—and the tale of Adam is above all the
myth of a supreme royal craftsman—the inner human spirit
itself now purports to be the work of a manufacturer. How to
awaken statues *to animated life: this is something that, until
recently, had simply been unknown to the human productive
capacity. Breath was the epitome of a divine technology capable
of closing the ontological gap between the clay idol and the
animated human with a pneumatic sleight of hand. Conse¬
quently, the title “God” denotes an expertise whose art extends

Inirooucticn 1 37

to the creation of living beings similar to oneself. As the creator
of all things, the God of Genesis is lord of both the dissimilar
and the similar. One can easily establish the significance of this
hypothesis by looking at the simplest and highest creatures
and, in the face of their givenness, reminding oneself that all
of these, without exception, are meant to be understood as
products of a single, continually active creative potency! Theolo¬
gians tend to deny, on the other hand, that crystals, amoebas,
trees or dragonflies are godlike. Nature, from a theological
perspective, is the name for God s self-realization in the dissimilar.
As far as realization in the similar is concerned, however, the
most eminent text states with authority that Adam resembled
his creator. One need therefore only take due notice of the
factual existence of the animated clay creature to ask almost
automatically: who was capable of that? Who was in a position
to make man? By what method was he, the similar one, the
subject, the spirited being who observes and handles the world
as world, installed? In so far as we are concerned with the
ceramic Adam, as stated earlier, we are sufficiently informed to
lift the secret of his existence, as we know the rules of working
with clay that reliably enable us to arrive at android figures. For
a further treatment of the statue to yield a living human, on the
other hand, we must introduce a pneumatic or noogenic bonus
that, it would seem, we have so far lacked any procedural rules to
imitate. The breathing in of life was a technical-hypertechnical
procedure that had to be honored as Gods exclusive patent
throughout the entire period of religious-metaphysical
thought. Nonetheless, in attributing Adams spirit to the skilled
act of a craftsman (or breathsman), the narrators of Genesis
stretch out their hands for this bonus.

38 / Bucb.os

Since then, one part of high-cultural theology has always
been the theology of the utmost skill and the interpretation of
the worlds totality in the light of a fabrication principle. God is
an ecstasy of that idea of competence which encompasses the
production of the world and its native subjectivities. With the
advent of theo-technical thought, the European obsession with
the ability to manufacture set in. One could yield to the suspi¬
cion that history itself, as a technological process, obeys the rule:
where there was once Gods secret technology, there must now
be public human techniques. Perhaps what we call historicity is
nothing but the time required for the attempt to repeat Gods
trick through human ability? This would urge us to conclude
that even the breath of life must one day become a thoroughly
formulated skill that can be brought down to earth from heaven.
But can we dare to imagine a technology that makes the
pneumatic rhythm of creation its own business? Should, with
sufficiently precise formulable artistic and procedural rules, even
the phenomenon once known as animation become something
amenable to serial production? Should it transpire that breath
sciences lie in the realm of possibility, and that the humanities
have already embarked on repeating the divine breath through
the higher mechanism? 11

With these questions, we are drawing a veiled theme of the
Jewish Genesis account to belated light: the issue here is Adams
chosen hollowness. What gives us food for thought is his vascu¬
lar nature, his resonant constitution, his preferred aptness as a
canal for breathing by an inspirator. From a conventional point
of view, the historically established preconception that there
must be an unbridgeable hierarchical divide—an ontological

Introduction / 39

difference—between creator and creature could re-establish
itself today. Is it not inevitable that the creature, even if we are
dealing with man in relation to the maker of man, is so distant
from its creator as to verge on meaninglessness? In this light,
even the first man ever created will always appear primarily as
the ceramic object shaped at will from an earthen nothing by
the hands of a master craftsman, only to fall back some day—
earth to earth—into the clay from which he originated.

It is only at second glance that a less hierarchical image of the
connection between the creator-subject and his breathed-on
piece of work suggests itself. Now we realize that there cannot
possibly be such a sharp ontological asymmetry between the
inspirator and the inspired as there is between an animated lord
and his inanimate tool. Where the pneumatic pact between the
giver and the taker of breath comes into effect—that is, where
the communicative or communional alliance builds up—this
results in a bipolar intimacy that cannot have anything in com¬
mon with a merely dominating control of a subject over a
manipulable object mass. Even if the breather and the one
breathed on face each other as first and second in temporal terms,
a reciprocal, synchronously interchanging relationship between
the two breath poles comes into effect as soon as the infusion of
the breath of life into the android form is complete. The main
part of God’s trick, it would seem, is to reckon with a counter-
breath immediately after the initial one: one could almost say
that the originator does not preexist the pneumatic work, but
creates himself synchronously with it as the intimate counterpart
of one like himself. Indeed, perhaps the notion of an originator
is simply a misleading, conventional figure to describe the phe¬
nomenon of the resonance that originally developed. Once set

4Q / Bubb’eo

up, the canal of animation between Adam and his Lord, filled
with endless double echo games, can only be understood as a
two-way system. The lord of all that lives would not also be the
God of answers in whose guise he appears in His early invoca¬
tions if confirmations of his breath impulses did not immediately
How back to Him from the animated figure. This breath is hence
conspiratory, respiratory and inspiratory from the outset; as soon
as breath exists, there are two breathing. With the number two at
the start, it would be misguided to force any statement about
which pole began in the interior of this dual. Naturally the myth
must seek to describe how everything started and what came
first—in this case as in most others. In attempting to do so in
earnest, however, it must now also speak of an original exchange
in which there can be no first pole. That is the meaning of the
biblical reference to Gods image: not that the Creator was some
mystical solo android who was one day seized by the whim to
trace His appearance—appearing to whom?—onto earthly
bodies. This would be as absurd as the notion that God could
have longed for the company of non-equal, formally similar clay
figures. The creation of subjectivity and mutual animation does
not refer to the hollow human puppet; the image of God is
simply a rigidly visualizing term from the jargon of the artist’s
workshop for a relationship of pneumatic reciprocity. The intimate
ability to communicate in a primary dual is Gods patent. It
suggests not so much a visually experienceable similarity between
an original image and the replica as the original augmentation
of God through his Adam, and of Adam through his God.
Breath science can only get underway as a theory of pairs.

With this phrase—original augmentation—we have named
a basic figure of the subsequent reflections in the sphero-

Introduction / 41

morphological field. Jt states that in the spiritual space—under
the as yet unconsolidated assumption that “spirit” refers to a
spatiality of its own kind—the simplest fact is automatically at
least a two-part or bipolar quantity. Isolated points are only
possible in the homogenized space of geometry and intercourse;
true spirit, however, is by definition spirit in and in relation to
spirit, and true soul is by definition soul in and in relation to
soul. In the present case, the elemental, initial and simple
already appears as a resonance between polar authorities; the
original expresses itself as a correlative duality from the start.
The addition of the second to the first occurs not in an external
and a posteriori supplementation—in the way that, in classical
logic, attributes join substances as latecomers of a sort, as
suppliers of properties. Certainly, if one thinks in substances,
the attributes arrive later, just as blackness is added to the horse
and redness to the rose. In the intimate sharing of subjectivity
by a pair inhabiting a spiritual space open for both, second and
first only appear together* Where the second does not enter, the
first was not given either. This means that whoever says “Creator”
without emphasizing Adam's prior coexistence with Him has
already strayed into an origin-monarchical error—just as anyone
who presumes to speak of humans without mentioning their
inspirators and intensifiers, or their media, which amount to the
same, has missed the topic through their very approach. A
Platonic horse or a heavenly rose: they could, if necessary, still
remain what they are without blackness or redness. As far as
God and Adam are concerned, however, they form—if the bond
of breath between them is indeed as the wording and sense of
the Genesis convey—a dyadic union from the start, a union that
can only last on the basis of a developed bipolarity. The primary

42./ Cubbies*

pair floats in an atmospheric biunity, mutual referentiality and
intertwined freedom from which neither of the primal partners
can be removed without canceling the total relationship.

If this strong relation inevitably seems asymmetrical in
theological tradition—characterized by a powerful leaning
towards Gods side—it is primarily because, aside from his
engagement with Adam, his co-subject, God is always assigned
the indivisible burden of cosmogonic responsibilities. God
appears as the absolute adult, indeed the only one in the uni¬
verse—Adam and his ilk, on the other hand, remain children to
the end in a sense. Only against this background was Augustine
able to say to his God: “But You, Lord, know all of him, for You
made him.” 12 For the church father, the joy of being understood
depends on the notion that only he who made you can also
understand and restore you. This provides the basic impulse for
all disciplines of the spirit and its healing, in so far as it marks
the advent of the idea that understanding means having made,
and, more importantly in religious terms, that having been
made means being able to be understood and repaired—an idea
on which all priesthood and all psychotherapeutic structures are
based to this day. The main purpose of this demiurgic interpre¬
tation of human creatureliness was to make the pact between the
producing God and the produced soul unbreakable. The
damaged but prudent soul should constantly think of its origi¬
nator or representative, the therapist, because only this thought
can save it from ontological isolation and from losing its way
amid the incomprehensible, the unmade, the fortuitous and the
external. It was to Adam before the Fall of Man, and to him and
his kind alone, that Saint Teresa of Avilas rule applied: the soul
must view all things as if the world consisted only of God and

(production / 43

the sou!—an idea still quoted approvingly by Leibniz 13 —whereas
it pleases God to express Himself not only in Adam and his
species, but in the entire household of the creation. In this
respect the biblical God resembled a husband who has the con¬
ventional expectation that his wife should be there for him
alone, while he must keep himself available not only for her, but
also for a world of business. But He also resembled a mother
who is good enough to give her child the secure sense that she is
wholly there for it whenever necessary, even though she also has
a house and hearth to look after when she is not attending to the
little being. These asymmetries initially thwart the equality in
the image; but this does not change the incomparable particu¬
larity of the pneumatic pact. The one breathed on is by necessity
an ontological twin of the breather. The two are bonded by an
intimate complicity such as can only exist between beings that
originally share the placenta of subjectivity. Adam and his Lord
live off the same ego-forming placenta—they nourish them¬
selves with the same I-am-who-I-am substance that spreads
between them like a subtle shared scent of intimacy and syn¬
chronous desire. The thorn bush in the desert burns not for
itself alone, but always for itself and Moses, its agent and repre¬
sentative. That is why he is not meant to gaze at the flames in
admiration when it burns, but form a chain of messengers: we,
this fire and my testimony to it, belong together like the message
and its immediate recipient. Flame and speech are original
accomplices. The open secret of the historical world is that the
power to belong together, which is experienced in exemplary
fashion by select couples—and, why not, by burning bushes and
prophets on fire—can be extended to communes, teams, project
groups, and perhaps even entire peoples.

44 / Bubbles

We refer to this connecting force, using a creaky word from
the nineteenth century, as solidarity. The nature of this force,
which allies people with their own kind or a superhuman other
in shared vibrations, has never been examined sufficiently
seriously in the history of thought. So far one has always pre¬
supposed and demanded solidarity, has attempted to raise it,
politicize it and sabotage it; people have sung its praises and
lamented its fragility; but never has anyone inquired far enough
back into its origin. At this point we have at least realized that
solidarity between people must be a transference phenomenon
outside of primary couple relationships and primal hordes. But
what is transferred here? The strong reason for being together is
still awaiting an adequate interpretation. 14

Let us translate these rhapsodic reflections on an Old Euro¬
pean and Middle Eastern theological motif into the language
of the present investigation: when the Jewish God and the
prototypical human each turn their contact side towards the
other, they form a shared interior sphere. What is here termed
a sphere is, in a first and provisional understanding, an orb in
two halves, polarized and differentiated from the start, yet
nonetheless intimately joined, subjective and subject to expe¬
rience—a biune shared space of present and past experience.
What is known in tradition as spirit is thus originally, through
sphere formation, spatially spread. In its basic form the sphere
appears as a twin bubble, an ellipsoid space of spirit and expe¬
rience with at least two inhabitants facing one another in polar
kinship. Living in spheres thus means inhabiting a shared subtlety.
The aim of this three-part book is to show that, for humans,
being-in-spheres constitutes the basic relationship—admittedly,

Irrroductlon / 45

one that is infringed upon from the start by the non-interior
world, and must perpetually assert itself against the provocation
of the outside, restore itself and increase. In this sense, spheres
are by definition also morpho-immunological constructs.
Only in immune structures that form interiors can humans
continue their generational processes and advance their indi¬
viduations. Humans have never lived in a direct relationship
with “nature,” and their cultures have certainly never set foot
in the realm of what we call the bare facts; their existence has
always been exclusively in the breathed, divided, torn-open
and restored space. They are the life forms designed to be
floating beings—if floating means depending on divided
moods and shared assumptions. Humans are thus fundamentally
and exclusively the creations of their interior and the products
of their work on the form of immanence that belongs insepa¬
rably to them. They flourish only in the greenhouse of their
autogenous atmosphere.

What recent philosophers referred to as “being-in-the-
world” first of all, and in most cases, means being-in-spheres. If
humans are there, 15 it is initially in spaces that have opened for
them because, by inhabiting them, humans have given them
form, content, extension and relative duration. As spheres are
the original product of human coexistence, however—some¬
thing of which no theory of work has ever taken notice—these
atmospheric-symbolic places for humans are dependent on
constant renewal. Spheres are air conditioning systems in
whose construction and calibration, for those living in real
coexistence, it is out of the question not to participate. The
symbolic air conditioning of the shared space is the primal
production of every society. Indeed—humans create their own

46 / Bubbles

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights , couple in bubble, detail

I' lrodue: <:r. / 47

climate; not according to free choice, however, but under
preexisting, given and handed-down conditions. 16

Spheres are constantly disquieted by their inevitable insta¬
bility: like happiness and glass, they bear the risks native to
everything that shatters easily. They would not be constructs of
vital geometry if they could not implode; even less so, however,
if they were not also capable of expanding into richer structures
under the pressure of group growth. Where implosion occurs,
the shared space as such is cancelled out. What Heidegger called
being-toward-death means not so much the individuals long
march into a final solitude anticipated with panic-stricken
resolve; it is rather the circumstance that all individuals will one
day leave the space in which they were allied with others in a
current, strong relationship. That is why death ultimately
concerns the survivors more than the deceased. 17 Human death
thus always has two faces: one that leaves behind a rigid body and
one that shows sphere residues—those that are sublated into
higher spaces and re-animated and those that, as the waste
products of things, fallen out of former spaces of animation, are
left lying there. In structural terms, what we call the end of the
world is the death of a sphere. This small-scale emergency is the
separation of the lovers, the empty apartment, the torn-up
photograph; its comprehensive form manifests itself as the death
of a culture, the burnt-out city, the extinct language. Human and
historical experience at least shows that spheres can continue to
exist even beyond mortal separation, and that things lost can
remain present in memories—as a memorial, a specter, a mission
or as knowledge. It is only because of this that not every sepa¬
ration of lovers need become the end of the world, and not every
change undergone by language a cultures demise. 18

48 / Bubbles

The fact that the internally differentiated bubble of those
in intimate coexistence can initially seem to be resolutely
dosed and secure in itself is due to the tendency of the com¬
municating poles to be consumed fully in their care for the
other half. This is also manifest in the Jewish creation myth: in
passing on His breath to Adam, the God of Genesis in fact
places His utmost stake in the pneumatic relation. Adam and
his companion, for their part, remain in their exclusive partner¬
ship with God for as long as they manage to allow nothing to
grow inside themselves other than what was originally
breathed into them: the awareness of their original counter¬
parts glory and its demand for an answer. I am the one closest
to you and your inspirator; you shall have no other inspirator
but me—the first commandment of dyadic communication.
Initially, there is nothing within them but the breathed, back-
and-forth double rejoicing of the pact against externality.
Adam and his God form an oscillatory circuit of generosity
that celebrates and elevates itself in dulci iubilo . Through
Gods communication with Adam, this mirroring of His being
radiates unanimously back to Him from Adam. Perhaps it is
appropriate to image the music of angels and sirens as the
sonic miracle of such an untainted bi-unanimity.

Unscathed spheres carry their destruction within them¬
selves: this too is taught with merciless stringency by the Jewish
paradise account. There is nothing to impair the perfection of
the first pneumatic bubble until the disturbance of a sphere
leads to the primal catastrophe. The distractable Adam falls prey
to a second inspiration through the secondary voices of the
serpent and the woman; as a result he discovers what theolo¬
gians called his freedom. Initially, however, this consists only in

Introduction- / 49

Masaccio, The Expulsion from Paradise, fresco, 1427,
Capella Brancacci, Florence, detail

50/ Bubbles

a certain willing openness to seduction by outside elements. The
phenomenon of freedom subsequently takes on its full, unnerving
magnitude by installing radicalized independence of will and the
desire for other things than those prescribed, indeed for many
kinds of things—all declensions of a metaphysically interpreted
evil will. From the very first whim of individual freedom,
however, humans lost the ability to stay in their place within the
purely sounding biunity of the God-self space, devoid of all
secondary voices. The “expulsion from paradise” is a mythical
title for the spherological primal catastrophe—in psychological
terminology it would be paraphrased as a general weaning
trauma. Only an event of this kind—the withdrawal of the first
completer—could give rise to what would later be termed the
“psyche”: the semblance of a soul that, almost like a private spark
or an isolated vital principle, inhabits a single desirous body. The
mythical process outlines the inevitable corruption of the
original interior-forming biunity through the emergence of a
third, a fourth and a fifth, which led to the advent of frolicking.
The biune world had known neither number nor resistance, for
even the mere awareness that there were other things, countable
and third options, would have corrupted the initial homeostasis.
The expulsion from paradise means the fell from the blissful
inability to count. In the dyad, the united two even have the
power to deny their twoness in unison; in their breathed retreat
they form an alliance against numbers and interstices. Secundum ,
tertium> quartum , quintum—non dantur . We are what we are,
without separations and joints: this space of happiness, this
vibration, this animated echo chamber. We live, as intertwined
beings, in the land of We. But this measureless, numberless
happiness with closed eyes cannot ever last anywhere; in post-

Inl'oductior / 51

paradise times—and does the count not always start “after
paradise lost”?—the sublime biune bubble is damned to burst.

The modalities of bursting set the conditions for cultural
histories. Transitional objects, new themes, secondary themes,
multiplicities and new media step between the two partners; the
symbiotic space, once intimate and filled with a single motif,
opens up into a multiple neutrality, where freedom is only granted
along with foreignness, indifference and plurality. It is torn open
by non-symbiotic urgencies; for the new is always born as some¬
thing that disturbs earlier symbioses. It intervenes in the
individual interior as an alarm and a compulsion. Now the adult
cosmos becomes clear as the epitome of work, struggle, diversion
and coercion. What was God becomes a lonely, transcendent
pole. He survives in the only way he can: as a distant delusional
address for scattered quests for salvation. What was Adams
symbiotically hollow interior now opens itself up to more and
less spiritless occupants known as worries, entertainments or
discourses; these fill out the space that, in the intimate state of
coexistence, would have wanted to remain for free for the one,
the initial breath partner. The adult has now understood that he
has no right to happiness; at most, a call to remember that other
state. Who would be allowed to follow it? The utmost that a con¬
sciousness filled with worry and violence can allow itself in the
way of symbolic nurturances are backward-looking, yet also
future-summoning phantasms of the reinstated dyad. Such
dreams belong to the stuff of which the visionary religions are
made; Platos magic trail through the course of the European
spirit also follows these dream lines. In countless encodings these
phantasms, partly in public and partly concealed, call up
witching images from the perfect globe of sheltering, sheltered

52 / 3ubul0o

mutual inspiration. Stirred up or sucked in by mysterious
memories and regressions, sunken notions of a prehistoric breath
community of the double soul on the sixth day of creation.

All history is the history of animation relationships. Its nucleus,
as certain anticipatory formulations hinted, is the biune bond of
radical inspiration communities. It may initially be unimportant
whether this bond is addressed in the terms of the creation myth
as the alliance of divine image between Yahwe and Adam, or
under the psychoanalytical concept of the early mother-child
dyad, or the poetic-existential figures of the inseparable lovers,
the twins, the Great Couple and the conspiring two. In all these
models, spheric liaisons are brought up in which reciprocal ani¬
mations generate themselves through radical resonance; each of
them demonstrates that real subjectivity consists of two or more
parties. Where two of these are exclusively opened towards each
other in intimate spatial division, a livable mode of subjectness
develops in each; this is initially no more or less than a partici¬
pation in spheric resonances.

In earlier times, it was almost exclusively religious traditions,
with special considerations, that bore witness to this enigma of
subjectivity as participation in a bipolar and pluripolar field. 19
Only with the incipient Modern Age did individual complexes
step out of these vague constructs and move towards worldly
views—especially in psychological, medical and aesthetic dis¬
courses. In premodern worlds, the only way for phenomena of
biune and communitarian inspiration to articulate themselves
was in religious languages—monovalent-animistic and bivalent-
metaphysical ones. It will therefore be inevitable in the following
reflections on the establishment of a general spherology also to

htoducrt cn / 53

open up the religious Fields of European and non-European
cultures in free traversals for an open discourse of intimacy. In
doing so, this anthropology beyond humans identifies itself
perhaps not as the servant-girl of theology, but certainly as its
pupil. It would not, admittedly, be the first to outgrow its
teacher. Worldly spherology is the attempt to free the pearl
from the theological oyster.

The spherological drama of development—the emergence
into history—begins at the moment when individuals step out
into the multipolar worlds of adults as poles of a biunity field.
They inevitably suffer a form of mental resettlement shock when
the first bubble bursts, an existential uprooting: they come out of
their infantile state by ceasing to live completely under the
shadow of the united other and thus starting to become inhabi¬
tants of an expanded psycho-sociosphere. For them, this is where
the birth of the outside takes place: upon emerging into the
open, humans discover what they initially think can never
become part of their own, inner, co-animated realm. There are,
as humans learn fascinatedly and painfully, more dead and outer
things between heaven and earth than any worldling can dream
of appropriating. When the youths bid farewell to their maternal
kitchens-cum-living rooms, they are confronted with subjectless,
external, excitingly uncontrollable phenomena. They would not
be viable human individuals, however, if they did not bring a
dowry of memories of the symbiotic field and its enclosing power
with them into the strange new land. It is this power to transfer
the integral space that ultimately also overcomes the intruder
trauma, the law of the disruptive third, fourth and fifth parties,
for it integrates the disrupter like a new sibling—as if, in fact, it
were a necessary element in its own system.

54 / 3uhbied

Introduction / 55

Micro della Francesca, Brent Madonna , detail

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is
in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again;
finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of
the ceremony. (Franz Kafka ) 20

Time and again, the literature of the interior deprives the for¬
tuitous and the senseless of its destructive sting. From the outset,

there is a process of world literature competing with the rise of the
external, the foreign, the fortuitous and those forces that threaten
to burst the sphere; its aim is to settle every outside, no matter
how cruel and unfitting, all demons of the negative and monsters
of foreignness, within an expanded inside. Context turns into
text—as often and as long as the external is worked away or
reduced to tolerable formats. In this sense, order is above all the
effect of a transference from interior to exterior. What we know as
the metaphysical worldviews of Old Europe and Asia are the
tensest ascetic drawings-in of the foreign, the dead and the
external into the circle of soul-animated, text-woven large-scale
interiors. Until yesterday, their poets were the thinkers. They
taught the citizens of being how to achieve symbiosis with the
stars and the stones; they interpreted the outside as an educator.
Hegels great synthesis is the last European monument to this will
to draw all negativity and externality into the inside of a logically
sealed dome. But philosophy could not have erected its sublime
constructions without the mandate of its carrier culture, and
logical syntheses presuppose the political and military situations
that demand such symbolic vaulting; their exoteric mission—living
on a large scale, ruling over palaces and distant borders—requires
consolidation through metaphysical knowledge. The first philos¬
ophy is the last transference. Novalis would go on to lift the secret
when he interpreted thought allied with writing as a general
homecoming: “Where are we going? Always home.” The total
parental home does not want to lose even the most foreign ele¬
ments. On all paths to high culture, sphere extension and growing
inclusivity dictate the law by which consciousness develops.

What we call growing up consists of these strenuous
resettlings of smaller subjectivities in larger world forms; often,

56 / BuoU^-i

ii simultaneously means the reformatting of the tribal con-
si iousness to suit imperial and text-supported circumstances.
I or the child we were, the expanded space of interaction may be
(he large family for a while; as soon as the familial horizon is
exceeded, however, the more developed social forms stake their
claims to form and animate the individuals. As far as prehistoric
limes are concerned, the decisive social form manifests itself as
(he horde, with a tendency towards forming clan communities
and tribes; in historical times, it appears as the people, with a
tendency towards founding cities, nations and kingdoms. In
both regimes, the prehistoric and the historical, human exis¬
tence never simply adjusts itself to fit into what, using a modern
and overly smooth term, we call its Environment”; rather, this
existence creates its own surrounding space through which and
in which it appears. Every social form has its own world house,
a bell jar of purpose, under which human beings First of all
gather, understand themselves, defend themselves, grow and
dissolve boundaries. The hordes, tribes and peoples, and the
empires all the more, are—in their respective formats—psycho-
sociospheric quantities that arrange themselves, climatize
themselves and contain themselves. At every moment of their
existence, they are forced to place above themselves, by their
typical means, their own semiotic heavens from which character¬
forming collective inspirations can flow to them.

No people can last in its own process of generations and in
competition with other peoples unless it succeeds in keeping
up its process of self-inspiration. What is referred to here as
autogenous inspiration is, more dispassionately expressed,
the continuum of ethnospheric climate techniques. Through
ethnotechniques spanning generations, tens and hundreds of

I'Hroauct on / 57

thousands, perhaps even millions of individuals are attuned to
superior collective spirits and particular rhythms, melodies, pro¬
jects, rituals and fragrances. By virtue of such formal games,
which produce a shared and productive sensuality, the collected
many keep finding the proof of their destiny to be together, even
under adverse conditions; where this proof becomes powerless,
discouraged people dissolve within stronger cultures or decline
into rioting bands and childless leftover groups . 21 Because of its
exaggerated aim, the task of enclosing such absurdly large num¬
bers of people in unifying systems of delusion sounds like an
impossible demand. Mastering precisely such difficulties,
however, was obviously part of the logic of the way in which
peoples were actually formed. In the historical world, it seems,
the more improbable option develops an inclination to assert
itself as the realer one. How implausible and impossible the
mere existence of a united mass like a people seems from the
perspective of the primal hordes—the cultural synthesis of a
thousand or ten thousand hordes—yet it is the peoples who
made history, sucked up the hordes and demoted them to mere
families or houses. To us, the concept of empire—in terms of
the swarming of tribes and peoples—seems all the more of an
impossibility; it is precisely the polyethnic empires, however,
that called the tune of volatile history during the last four
millennia and translated their expectations of order into reality.
Anyone who studies the course of the past ten millennia with
regard to the creation of peoples must conclude from the
evidence that wherever there are peoples, divine heavens to
form these peoples cannot be far away. The native gods stand,
like ethnotechnic universals, for communality instead of diverse
segments—they are the unbelievable that demanded belief, and

58/ b

did so with the greatest historical success. Almost everywhere,
brute force had a catalytic role in ethnopoietic processes. It is
only the language games of the gods, however, that prove to be
effective guarantees of longer-lasting ethnospheric animation
effects; one could say that they ensure syntheses of peoples a priori .

The case of the Jewish Yahwe, the spirit God who blows
over the desert, is an especially striking example of a supreme
inspirator carrying out His ethnopoietic office for His chosen
people. Not only does he remain the intimate God of Adam
and Abraham, and offer himself to human souls in the
monotheistic cultures as the eternal super-thou; He is, above
all, the transcendent integrator who unites the twelve tribes to
form the people of Israel. He is the one who stabilizes his people
not only as bearers of the law, but also as a military stress
community , 22 enabling them to assert themselves at the ever-
changing batdefronts of innumerable conflicts. He commits
Himself to His people in the most remarkable manner by bind¬
ing it to Him through the pneumatic legal form of the
covenant. Friedrich Heer once observed that the sheer physical
existence of the Jewish people in the present essentially
amounts to a proof of God from history; in less effusive terms,
one could say that the historical persistence of Judaism through
the last three thousand years at least constitutes the most
concrete of all spheric proofs based on survival . 23

In spherological terms, peoples appear above all as commu¬
nities of cult, arousal, effort and inspiration. As autogenous
vessels, they live and survive only under their own atmospheric,
semiospheric bell jar. Through their gods, their stories and
their arts, they supply themselves with the breath—and thus
the stimuli—that make them possible. In this sense, they are

IrKrodueljon / 69

successful pneumotechnic and auto-stressory constructs. By
lasting, peoples prove their ethnotechnic genius ipso facto . And
although the individuals within peoples pursue their own con¬
cerns in relative obliviousness, overarching myths, rituals and
self-stimulations still create social fabrics of sufficient ethnic
coherence, even from the most resistant material. Such endoge¬
nously stressed collective bodies are spheric alliances that drift
in the current of the ages. That is why the most successful
sphere-forming communities, the religion-based folk traditions
or cultures, have survived for centuries with impressive ethno-
spiritual constancy. The prime example, alongside Judaism, is
Indo-Aryan Brahmanism, which has been symbolically air-
conditioning the Hindu world for millennia. The Chinese
continuum likewise confirms the law that sphere politics is fate:
was China not one great artistic exercise on the theme “exis¬
tence in an exteriorless, self-immured space” until the turn of
our decade? We shall attempt, especially in the second volume,
to explain how this imperial enclosure reflected the characteristic
spatial understanding of the metaphysical epoch.

Speaking of spheres, then, does not only mean developing a
theory of symbiotic intimacy and couple-surrealism; though
sphere theory by its nature begins as a psychology of inner
spatial formation from biune correspondences, it inevitably
develops further into a general theory of autogenous vessels . This
theory provides the abstract form for all immunologies. Under
the sign of the spheres, finally, the question is posed as to the
form of political outer space creations as such.

In our account, then, sphere psychology will go before
sphere politics; the philosophy of intimacy must be used to

60 /

support political morphology, open it up, accompany it and
circle it. This order has an obvious dramaturgical reason, but
ultimately stems from the matter itself At its beginning, every
life goes through a phase in which a mild two-person illusion
defines the world. Caring ecstasies enclose mothers and children
in an amorous bell whose resonances remain, under all circum¬
stances, a precondition for a successful life. Early on, however,
the unified two become related to third, fourth and fifth ele¬
ments; as the singular life ventures out of its initial shell,
additional poles and larger spatial dimensions open up, each
defining the extent of the developing and developed connec¬
tions, worries and participation. In fully-grown spheres, forces
are at work that draw the individual into an illusion shared by
millions. It seems impossible to live in large societies without
yielding in some measure to the delirium of ones own tribe. From
the outset, therefore, spherology examines the risks involved in
transference processes from micro- to macropsychoses. What it
considers above all else, however, is the exodus of the living
from the real and the virtual mothers womb into the dense
cosmoses of the regional advanced civilizations, and beyond
these into the non-round, non-dense foam worlds of modern
global culture. In this, our account follows the Romanesque
idea of describing the world as a glass bead game, even if,
conditioned by its subject, it will take away the weightlessness
of this motif. Spheres are forms as forces of destiny—from the
fetal marble in its private, dark waters to the cosmic-imperial
ball that appears before us with the supremely confident aim of
containing and rolling over us.

Once spheres are elevated to a theme as effective forms of
the real, the perspective of the world s form reveals the key to its

Introduction / 61

symbolic and pragmatic order. We can explicate why, wherever
people think in large round forms, the idea of self-sacrifice
inevitably gains power. From time immemorial, the massive
globes that present mortals with their comforting roundness
have demanded that whatever does not fit into the smooth
curvature of the whole should be subordinated to them: first of
all the stubborn, cumbersome, private ego, which has always
resisted complete absorption into the great round self. The
forces of empire and salvation find their obligatory aesthetic in
the circle. Hence our phenomenology of spheres is forced by
the obstinacy of its theme to overturn the morphological altar
on which, in imperial times, the non-round was always sacri¬
ficed to the round. On the largest scale, the theory of spheres
leads into a critique of round reason.

The first book of this sphere trilogy speaks of microspheric units
that will be referred to here as bubbles . They constitute the inti¬
mate forms of the rounded being-in-form and the basic molecule
of the strong relationship. Our analysis sets about the task, never
undertaken before, of narrating the epic of those biunities that
have always been lost to the adult intelligence, yet never fully
eradicated. We shall dive into a lost history that tells of the
blossoming and sinking of the intimate Atlantis; we will explore
a breathed continent Ln the matriarchal sea that we inhabited in
a subjectively prehistoric time, and abandoned with the start of
what we believe to be our own histories. In this distinctive world,
elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic. Recog¬
nizing our inevitable conceptual helplessness as our only sure
companion, we traverse landscapes of pre-objective existence and
prior relationships. If it were appropriate to speak of penetrating,

62 / BuhWos

Leonardo da Vinci, drawing with uterus, embryo and placenta, c. 1520, detail

one might say that we will penetrate into the realm of intimate
absurdities . 24 The things themselves, however, as becomes
apparent, will only tolerate non-invasive invasions; in this area
one must entrust oneself, more permissively than in ones usual
methodical explorations and goal-directed thought tasks, to a
drift that pulls us forwards on the lymphatic currents of pre-
subjectively primitive self-awareness. On the way through the
evasive underworld of the inner world, the schematic image of a
fluid and auratic universe unfolds like a map in sound, woven
entirely from resonances and suspended matter; it is there that
we must seek the prehistory of all things pertaining to the soul.

Introduction / 63

By its very nature, this search has the form of an impossible
problem that can neither be solved nor left: alone.

These journeys along the edges to the source regions of the
soul, self-sense and entwinement bring to light just how far the
prehistory of the intimate has always proceeded as a history of
mental catastrophe. One cannot speak of the intimate spheres
without mentioning how their bursting and expanded regeneration
take place. All amniotic sacs , 25 organic models of autogenous
vessels, live towards their bursting; with the turbulent waters of
birth, every life is washed up on the coast of harder facts. Those
who reach it can use those facts to explain what drives the
intimate, all too intimate bubbles to failure and forces their
inhabitants into transformations.

The second book of Spheres will open up a historico-political
world whose models are the geometrically exact orb and the
globe. Here we enter the Parmenidean dimension: a universe
whose boundaries are drawn with a compass and whose center
is occupied by a specifically philosophical, circumspect and
overflowing joviality. In the era of metaphysics and classical
empires, not so much overcome as simply forgotten, God and
the world seemingly made a pact to present everything intrin¬
sically being thing as an inclusive orb. Theology and ontology
have, as far as we can see, always been teachings on the round
container form; only from this perspective do the shapes of the
empire and the cosmos become conceivable in a binding fashion.
Not without reason was Nicholas of Cusa able to write: “And
so, the whole of theology is said to be circular .” 26 Theologians
may continue under the illusion that their God is deeper than
the God of the philosophers; but the God of the morphologists

64 / Burglar!

Mosaic showing a group of philosophers from the Villa Albani, Rome, 1st century BC

is deeper than the God of the theologians . 27 On such expedi¬
tions into worlds now almost entirely lost, where the idea of a
necessary roundness of the whole predominated, we gain
insights into the function and construction of political ontolo¬
gies in premodern empires. There is no traditional empire that
failed to secure its borders by cosmological means, and no
ruling body that did not discover the instruments of political
immunology for itself. What is world history if not also the war

htroauc'o^ / 66

history of immune systems? And the early immune systems—
were they not always militant geometries too?

The recollection of the venerable doctrines of orb-shaped being
uncovers the philosophical origins of a process that, under the
name of “globalization,” is on everyone’s lips today. Its true story
needs to be told—from the geometrization of the heavens in
Plato and Aristotle to the circumnavigation of the final orb, the
earth, through ships, capitals and signals. It will transpire how
the Uranian globalization of ancient physics had to change into
terrestrial globalization upon its modern failure. Underlying
this is the decision to give the globe back the significance that is
assigned to it nominally in the usual talk of globalization, but
never in a conceptually serious fashion, namely as the true icon
of heaven and earth. Once one has gained an idea of terrestrial
globalization as the basic process of the Modern Age, it can be
made clear why a third globalization, triggered by the rapid
images in the networks, is currently leading to a general space
crisis. This is indicated by the concept, as familiar as it is opaque, of
virtuality . The virtual space of cybernetic media is the modernized
outside that can no longer be presented as one form of the divine
interior; it is made feasible in the shape of technological exte¬
riority—and hence as an outside that lacks any inside
counterpart from the outset. Cybernetic virtuality was preceded
by philosophical virtuality, admittedly, which had been founded
with the Platonic exposition of the world of ideas. Classical
metaphysics already cast vulgar spatial thought into a crisis, for
Plato made the virtual sun known as “good” rise over the sensual
world, and it is only from this that everything that is “real” about
the three-dimensionally sensual gains being at all. The current

66 / r.v..;c;b t r;-:.

writings about virtual space are just in time to participate in the
2,400-year anniversary of the discovery of the virtual.

The concept of the sphere—both as an enlivened space and as
the imagined and virtual orb of being—is ideally suited to reca¬
pitulating the transition from the most intimate to the most
encompassing, from the closed to the burst-open concept of
space. That the space-spawning extraversions of the spheres show
a touch of the weird and even the monstrous was hinted at by
Rilke, who did more for the poetics of space than any contem¬
porary thinker, in a decisive verse:

And how perplexed must any womb-born creature feel, who is

obliged to fly thin air. 28

The theory of spheres is a morphological tool that allows us to
grasp the exodus of the human being, from the primitive sym¬
biosis to world-historical action in empires and global systems, as
an almost coherent history of extraversion. It reconstructs the
phenomenon of advanced civilization as the novel of sphere
transference from the intimate minimum, the dual bubble, to the
imperial maximum, which one should imagine as a monadic
round cosmos. If the exclusivity of the bubble is a lyric motif, the
inclusivity of the orb is an epic one.

It is in the nature of the matter that the phenomenology of
imperial roundnesses must turn into a critical gynecology of the
state and the large-scale church; in the course of our account, we
will in fact show that peoples, empires, churches and, above all,
modern nation states, are not least space-political attempts to
recreate fantastic wombs for infantilized mass populations by

;rlroduc:cv' / 67

imaginary and institutional means. Because the greatest of aJl
possible container figures had to be envisaged as the one God in
the age of patriarchal metaphysics, however, the theory of the orb
leads directly to a morphological reconstruction of Western
ontotheology: this doctrine conceptualizes God Himself, in
Himself and for Himself, as an all-encompassing orb of which
esoteric doctrines circulating since the High Middle Ages would
claim that its center was everywhere and its perimeter nowhere. 29
Was the process of the Modem Age not identical, in its deep
structure, to the attempts of European intellectuals to find their
bearings in this unstable super-orb?

From the early Middle Ages, Catholic infernologists con¬
sidered that humans are beings which could fall out of the divine
round space. It was only with Dante that hell was cleared up
geometrically: in his vision, even those who are excommunicated
from the divine orb after judgment will remain contained in the
immanences of hell’s circles—we shall refer to these, with the
rings of the Commedia in mind, as the anti-spheres. Their
description, as remains to be shown, anticipates the modern
phenomenology of depression and the psychoanalytical separation
of analyzable and non-analyzable spirits. 30

In examinations of the metaphysics of telecommunication in
large-scale social bodies, we will show how the classical empires
and ecclesiae managed to present themselves as sun-like orbs
whose rays break forth from a monarchic center to illuminate
even the periphery of all that is. 31 Here it becomes apparent why
the attempts of classical metaphysics to conceive of all that is as
a concentrically organized monosphere were doomed to failure,
for more reasons than immanent construction errors—why, in
fact, such a hyper-orb, because of its forced abstractness, was a

68/Bubbte

Hawed immunological design to begin with. The widespread
homesickness for the Aristotelian world that is seeing a particular
tevival today, and which recognizes its goal in the word “cosmos”
and its longing in the phrase “world soul,” exists not least because
we do not practice any historical immunology, and draw the
dangerously false conclusion from the evident immunodeficiencies
of contemporary cultures that earlier world systems were
i obstructed better in this respect. The livability of the classically
mtalistic systems of former times is a peculiar matter, however.
< )ik need only recall the Gnostic claustrophobia under the
tyrannical walls of heaven, or the early Christian unease about
encompassing the world at all, to judge how far the world of late
antiquity already saw reasons to revolt against the flawed
immunological design of its official cosmology. We will explain
Itow the Christian epoch was only able to discover the formula
lor its success in a historic compromise of its immune systems,
both the personalistic-religious and the imperial-constructivistic—
and why their decline had to result in the technization of
immunity that characterizes modernity.

Finally, it will have to be shown how the delayed failure of
the European dream of universal monarchy supplied the driving
forces for the terrestrial globalization process, in whose course the
scattered cultures on the last orb will be drawn together into an
ecological stress commune. 32

The third book will address the modern catastrophe of the round
world. Using morphological terms, it will describe the rise of
an age in which the form of the whole can no longer be imagined
in terms of imperial panoramas and circular panopticons.
From a morphological perspective, modernity appears primarily

Introsuction / 69

Planetarium under construction in Jena in the 1920s

as a form-revolutionary process. It is not by chance that its
conservative critics decried it as a loss of the center and rejected
it as a rebellion against the divine circle—to this day. For
Catholic Old Europeans, the essence of the Modern Age can still
be expressed in a single phrase: spheric blasphemy. Much less
nostalgically, though taking an untimely non-Catholic path, our
spherological approach supplies the means to characterize the
catastrophes of world form in modernity—that is, terrestrial and
virtual globalization—in terms of non-round sphere formations.

This contmdictio in adiecto mirrors the formal dilemma of the
current contemporary state of the world, in which global markets
and media have ignited an acute world war of ways of life and
informational commodities. When everything has become the
center, there is no longer any valid center; when everything is
transmitting, the allegedly central transmitter is lost in the tangle
of messages. We see how and why the age of the one, the greatest
all-encompassing circle of unity and its bowed exegetes has
irrevocably passed. The guiding morphological principle of the
polyspheric world we inhabit is no longer the orb, but rather foam.
The structural implication of the current earth-encompassing
network—with all its eversions into the virtual realm—is thus
not so much a globalization as a foaming. In foam worlds, the
individual bubbles are not absorbed into a single, integrative
hyper-orb, as in the metaphysical conception of the world, but
rather drawn together to form irregular hills. With a phenome¬
nology of foams, we shall attempt to advance—in concepts
and images—towards a political amorphology that gets to the
bottom (less) 33 of the metamorphoses and paradoxes of the
solidary space in the age of multifarious media and mobile world
markets. Only a theory of the amorphous and non-round could,
by examining the current fame of sphere destructions and sphere
regenerations, offer the most intimate and general theory of the
present age. Foams, heaps, sponges, clouds and vortexes serve as
the first amorphological metaphors, and will help to investigate
the formation of inner worlds, the creation of contexts and the
architectures of immunity in the age of unfettered technical
complexity. What is currently being confusedly proclaimed in all
the media as the globalization of the world is, in morphological
terms, the universalized war of foams.

ir i reduction / 71

As ail inevitable result of the subject itself, we shall also
encounter perspectives on sphere pathology in the modern-
postmodern process. Referring to a pathology of spheres displays
a threefold focus: a politicological one, in so far as foams tend to
be ungovernable structures with an inclination towards morpho¬
logical anarchy; a cognitive one, in so far as the individuals and
associations of subjects can no longer produce any complete
world, as the idea of the whole world itself, in its characteristically
holistic emphasis, unmistakably belongs to the expired age of
metaphysical total-inclusion-circles, or monospheres; and a
psychological one, in so far as single individuals in foams tend to
lose the power to form mental-emotional spaces, and shrink to
isolated depressive points transplanted into random surroundings
(correctly referred to systemically as their environment). They
sufFer from the immunodeficiency caused by the deterioration of
solidarities—to say nothing, for the moment, of the new immu¬
nizations acquired through participation in regenerated sphere
creations. For sphere-deficient private persons, their lifespan
becomes a sentence of solitary confinement; egos that are exten¬
sionless, scarcely active and lacking in participation stare out
through the media window into moving landscapes of images. It
is typical of the acute mass cultures that the moving images have
become far livelier than most of their observers: a reproduction
of animism in step with modernity.

In fact, the soul in the non-round age must, even under the
most favorable conditions, be prepared for the fact that for the
single bubbles, the self-completing, released individuals who
furnish their personal spaces medially, the hybrid global foam
will remain something impenetrable; at least navigability can
partially replace transparency. Certainly, as long as the world

htrooucnion / 73

Annika von HausswolfF, Attempting to Deal with Time and Space > 1997

(A i

could still be panoptically overviewed as a whole from a single
ruling point, it seemed intelligible through the self-transparency
with which the divine orb illuminated itself in order to possess
itself completely at every point. The notion of human participa¬
tion in such a provision of transparency released imperial and
monologic forms of reason; the world as a whole was illuminated
by the circumspection that ruled from the center. God Himself
was nothing but the center and the perimeter of the orb of being
that was projected and viewed by Him, and all thought that
based itself on Him shared analogously in the sublimity of His
central view. In the foam worlds, however, no bubble can be
expanded into an absolutely centered, all-encompassing,
amphiscopic orb; no central light penetrates the entire foam in
its dynamic murkiness. Hence the ethics of the decentered, small
and middle-sized bubbles in the world foam includes the effort
to move about in an unprecedentedly spacious world with an
unprecedentedly modest circumspection; in the foam, discrete
and polyvalent games of reason must develop that learn to live
with a shimmering diversity of perspectives, and dispense with
the illusion of the one lordly point of view. Most roads do not lead
to Rome—that is the situation, European: recognize it. Thinking
in the foam means navigating on unstable currents—others would
say that it changes, under the impression of the thought tasks of
the time, into a plural and transversal practice of reason. 34

With this neither gay nor sad science of foams, the third
book of Spheres presents a theory of the current age whose main
tenor is that deanimation has an insurmountable lead over
reanimation. It is the inanimable outside that gives food for
thought in intrinsically modern times. This conclusion will
inevitably drive the nostalgic yearning for a conception of the

introduction / 75

world, which still aims for a livable whole in the education-
holistic sense, into resignation. For whatever asserts itself as
the inner realm, it is increasingly exposed as the inner side of
an outside. No happiness is safe from endoscopy; every blissful,
intimate, vibrating cell is surrounded by swarms of professional
disillusioned, and we drift among them—thought paparazzi,
deconstructivists, interior deniers and cognitive scientists,
accomplices in an unlimited plundering of Lethe, The rabble of
observers, who want to take everything from without and no
longer understand any rhythm—have we not long since become
part of them, in most matters and at most moments? And how
could it be any different? Who could inhabit in such a way that
they inhabit everything? Or in such a way that they do not
interfere in anything exterior? The world, it seems, has grown
much too large for people of an older type, who strove for true
community with things both near and far. The hospitality of the
sapiens beings towards what arose behind the horizon has long
been strained beyond the critical level. No institution, not even
a church that thought kata holon and loved universally—let
alone an individual who reads on bravely—can imagine that it
is sufficiently open for everything that infiltrates, speaks and
encounters it; viewed from any point in our lifeworld, the vast
majority of individuals, languages, works of art, commodities
and galaxies remain an unassimilable outside world, by necessity
and forever. All “systems,” whether households, communes,
churches or states—and especially couples and individuals—are
damned to their specific exclusivity; the Zeitgeist celebrates its
responsibility-free connivance in the external multiplicity with
increasing openness. Intellectual history today: the endgames of
external observation.

7 e> / B ,’!;b« -s

l : iom C. V. Boys, Soap-Bubbles, and the Forces which Mould Them , London, 1902

Whether these diagnoses lead to disturbing and restrictive
conclusions or to beneficial openings and syntheses is an open
question. In all three parts, this treatise on spheres as world-
creating formal potencies is an attempt to speak about the
contemporary world without innocence. Anyone who relates
experiences of the Modern Age to themselves must stand by the
loss of innocence in three respects: psychologically, politologi-
cally and technologically. What makes this more difficult is that
a complicated difference between losing innocence and attaining
adulthood reveals itself. Be that as it may—it is nothing new
that thinking means breaking with harmlessness.

The present account of the rise and the changes in the shape of
the spheres is, as far as we know, the first attempt since the
failure of Oswald Spengler s “morphology of world history” to
restore the highest priority in an anthropological and culture-
theoretical investigation to a concept of form. Spenglers
morphological pretensions, despite his invocation of Goethe as
a patron, were doomed to failure, because they applied to their

I 'lroaucnori / 77

objects a concept of form that could not possibly do justice to
their willfulness and history. It was already a brilliant act of force
to isolate cultures in general as “life forms of the highest order,”
declaring them windowless units that grow and decline purely
according to immanent laws, and force was even more necessary
for Spengler to interpret his cultures as thousand-year empires of
a regional soul disposition—as soap bubbles of the highest
order, so to speak, that would be kept in their shape through
internal tensions of an occult nature. The descriptions of life
presented under the sign of morphology for the eight cultures he
acknowledged may have their place of honor in the history of
cultural philosophy as the monument to a great, perhaps
incomparable speculative and deductive energy; it is, however, a
monument best placed in one of the quieter corners. As far as
the application of morphological concepts in the cultural
sciences is concerned, Spengler s example has so far had rather
discouraging effects. Our own attempt can therefore not be
overly indebted to such a model—except as an impressive
demonstration of what should be avoided in future.

If we speak here of spheres as self-realizing forms, we do so
in the conviction that we are not imposing concepts—and if
they were imposed in a certain sense, it would be in a manner
encouraged by the objects themselves. The theory of the spheres:
that means gaining access to something that is the most real, yet
also the most elusive and least tangible of things. Even to speak
of gaining access is misleading, for the discovery of the spheric
is less a matter of access than of a slowed-down circumspection
amid the most obvious. We are always ecstatically involved in
spheric circumstances from the start, even if, for deep-seated
and culturally specific reasons, we have learned to overlook

78 / Muhi.;los

ihem, think past them and exclude them from our discussions.
Because of its orientation towards objectivity, European scien¬
tific culture is an undertaking that aims to de-thematize spheric
ecstasy. The animated interiority we shall attempt to show in all
basic circumstances of human culture and existence is indeed a
realissimum that initially eludes any verbal or geometric depic¬
tion—any representation at all, in fact—and yet, at every point
of existence, forces something resembling original circle and orb
formations—thanks to a potency of rounding that takes effect
prior to all formal and technical constructions of circles.

The inherent morphological dynamic of the worlds shared
by those who live together in reality is that of arrondissements ,
which form as they please without any contribution from the
geometricians. The self-organization of the psychocosmic and
political spaces lead to those metamorphoses of the circle in
which existence gives itself its spheric-atmospheric constitution.
The word “self-organization”—which is used here without the
usual scientistic hysteria—is meant to draw attention to the fact
that the circle holding humanity is neither purely made nor
purely found, instead rounding itself spontaneously on the
threshold between construction and self-realization. Or, more
accurately put: it realizes itself in rounding events—just as those
gathered around a hearth group freely and decidedly around the
fireplace and its immediate advantages of warmth . 35 Hence the
spherological analysis initiated with this first volume, beginning
with the micro-forms, is neither a purely constructivist projec¬
tion of rounded-off spaces in which people imagine they are
leading a shared existence, nor a purely ontological meditation
on the circle in which mortals are captured through an inaccessible
transcendent order.

Ina eduction / /9

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights , outside view with closed wings

As an introduction to a medial poetics of existence, the ini¬
tial aim of spherology is simply to retrace the formations of
shapes among simple immanences that appear in human (and
extra-human) systems of order—whether as organizations of
archaic intimacy, as the spatial design of primitive peoples, or
as the theological-cosmological self-interpretation of traditional

empires. At first glance, the present study, especially in its
second part, could thus have the appearance of a cultural history
defamiliarized with the aid of morphological, immunological
and transference-theoretical concepts. This view, though it does
not yet lead to our central concerns, would be neither entirely
false nor entirely unwelcome—provided one is willing to admit
that only from philosophy can the intelligence learn how its
passions find concepts.

.IntrccbcUGn / 81

PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS

Thinking the Interior

I put an apple on my table. Then I put myself inside this
apple. What tranquility I

— Henri Michaux, “Magic”

Humans are beings that participate in spaces unknown to
physics: the formulation of this axiom enabled the development
of a modern psychological typology that scattered humans—
without regard for their first self-localizations—among radically
different places, conscious and unconscious, day-like and nightly,
honorable and scandalous, places that belong to the ego and
places where inner others have set up camp. Wbat lends modern
psychological knowledge its strength and autonomy is that it has
shifted the human position beyond the reach of geometry and
registration offices. Psychological investigations have responded
to the question of where a subject is located with answers that
belie physical and civil appearances. Only the bodies of the dead
can be localized unambiguously; the anatomist, standing
before his granite table, will not have any doubts about the
location of his object: for the bodies in the outer space, the

observers coordinates alone are of interest. With beings that
are alive in a humanly ecstatic manner, the question of place is
fundamentally different, as the primary productivity of human
beings lies in working on their accommodation in wayward,
surreal spatial conditions.

In reaching this insight, psychology is initially assured the
agreement of cultural anthropology: only through secession
from their old nature have humans become an ontological fringe
group that disconcerts itself. They cannot be adequately
explained by what is natural, or rather old-natural, about
them—despite the abundance of attempts to portray cultures as
emerging continuously from natural processes. In the midst of
outer nature and above their inner nature, humans lead the lives
of islanders, at first constantly confusing their symbolic actions,
their acclimatizations, their pamperings and their breakings-
away from instinct-guided patterns with what is self-evident,
and in this sense with the natural of old. Upon closer inspection,
however, they live initially only in constructs that have grown
from within themselves like second natures—in their languages,
their systems of ritual and meaning, and in their constitutive
deleria, which are admittedly propped up somewhere on the
earths surface. (The political is the product of group delusion
and territory.)

The revolution of modern psychology does not stop at
explaining that all humans live constructivistically, and that
every one of them practices the profession of the wild interior
designer, continually working on their accommodation in
imaginary, sonorous, semiotic, ritual and technical shells. The
specific radicality of the sciences of human psychology only
becomes manifest when they interpret the subject as something

84 /' BuDble^

that not only arranges itself within symbolic orders, but is also
taken up ecstatically into the shared activity of arranging the
world with others. It is not only the designer of its own interior,
filled with relevant objects; it must also, constantly and
inevitably, allow itself to be placed as a friendly furnishing
in the container of the close and closest inner parties. Conse¬
quently, the relationship between human subjects sharing a
field of proximity can be described as one between restless
containers that contain and exclude one another. How can one
conceive of this bizarre relationship? In the physical space, it is
impossible for something within a container simultaneously to
contain its container. It is equally inconceivable to imagine a
body in a container as something that is excluded from that
very container. It is precisely with relationships of this type,
however, that the doctrine of psychological space deals from the
start. This notion, an insurmountable paradox in geometric
and physical terms, is the point of departure for the doctrine of
psychological or human locators: individuals are subjects only
to the extent that they are partners in a divided and assigned
subjectivity. If one wished to take this to its precarious limits
and revive Platonic intuitions in contemporary formulations,
one could say: every subject is the restless remainder of a couple
whose missing half never ceases to make demands on the one
left behind.

With the very first lines it draws, then, modem psychology
dissolves the individualistic semblance, which attempts to
understand individuals as substantial ego units that voluntarily
interact with others like members of a liberal club—after the
fact, arbitrarily and revocably, as befits the ideology of the indi¬
vidualistic contract society. Where such individualisms appear,

Tni'xrg the interior / 85

there is considerable psychological evidence pointing to a liberty-
neurotic starting position; it is characteristic of this position that
a subject cannot conceive of itself as contained, restricted,
encompassed or occupied. It is the basic neurosis of Western
culture to have to dream of a subject that watches, names and
owns everything, without letting anything contain, appoint or
own it, not even if the discreetest God offered himself as an
observer, container and client. The dream persistently returns of
an all-inclusive, monadic ego orb whose radius is its own
thought—a thought that would easily pass through its spaces up
to the outermost periphery, gifted with a wonderfully effortless
discursivity that no real external thing could resist.

The other side of this masterful panoptic egotism shows itself
in the Jonah complex, whose subject would have created a happy
exile for himself in the belly of a whale, like the thirteen-year-old
whose phantasms the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel described: in
his daydreams, the young man longed to set foot in the mon¬
strous inside of a giantess whose abdominal cavity presented itself
as a vault ten meters high. In the center of her stomach there was
supposed to be a swing on which the blissful Jonah would propel
himself aloft, safe in the knowledge that even the wildest vigor
would never carry him out of there . 36 The first, fixed ego, which
contains everything in its view around itself, and the second
ego, the swinging one that allows itself to be contained fully by
its cavity, are related in character insofar as both attempt to
withdraw from the folded, interlaced, participatory structure
of the real human space. Both have annulled the original
dramatic difference between inside and outside by placing them¬
selves, in a fantastic manner, in the middle of a homogeneous
sphere not challenged by any real outside or unappropriated

88 f

Federico Fellini, Casanova: the great Muna

other. Clearly, the thesis that everything is outside is no less
delirious than the longing to have everything on the inside. The
two extreme postulates, which are probably tempting for all
Western individuals in one way or another, tend away from the
ecstatic entwinement of the subject in the shared interior, where
those who actually live together wear one another out.

The truth and wisdom of modern psychology with regard to
such phantasms of impregnable inwardness or sovereign out¬
wardness lies in its description of the human space as an
intertwining of several interior spaces; here the surreal becomes
the real. Every subject in the real consubjective space is containing,
in so far as it absorbs and grasps other subjective elements, and
contained, in so far as it is encompassed and devoured by the

TfV'Kpg the Integer / 87

Collecting vessels: 1. large bottle for spirits with tube, 2, single-bellied bottle, 3. col¬
lecting vessel dosed at top, 4. bellied twin collecting vessel, 5. elongated twin collecting
vessel, 6. the same in bottle form, 7. double-bellied bottle, 8. connecting vessel

circumspections and arrangements of others. The real human
proximity field is thus more than a simple system of communi¬
cating vessels; if your fluid rises in my tubes and vice versa, this is
only the first indication of what allows humans to affect one
another at close range through their joins and overflows. As a sys¬
tem of hybrid communicating vessels, the human interior consists
of paradoxical or autogenous hollow bodies that are at once tight
and leaky, that must alternate between the roles of container and
content, and which simultaneously have properties of inner and
outer walls. Intimacy is the realm of surreal autogenous containers.

88 / B'-jUcs

Receiving and connecting vessels: L “tiara* for connecting coils> M. cydaris, N. alembic
with connecting tube, O. alembic for cooling, P small alembics for flasks and vials, Q.
combination of blind and beak alembic, R. triple blind alembic, S. triple beak alembic

Intimacy: with this much-abused keyword, for want of any
better and less prostituted one, we shall attempt in the following
investigations to get closer to the secrets of human displace¬
ment, which always begins as inward displacement (before
becoming conspicuous as outward displacement). Perhaps it is
useful, as far as the challenge of the idea is concerned, to
approach the most unusual relationship with the most worn-
out of terms. It would be premature at this point to address
Heideggers remark that Dasein means ‘suspendedness in
nothingness”—for we are not yet far enough to say with

Tanking Hie Intenor / 89

refreshed explicitness what Dasein , suspendedness, nothingness,
and above all in actually mean . 37 It would be equally inappro¬
priate now to discuss the theorem put forward by Deleuze and
Foucault, namely that the subject is a fold of the outside; for we
are still absolutely ignorant of any surface or outwardness whose
folding could produce something resembling an interior or a
self. We shall make just one anticipatory observation: intimacy,
beyond its first sugary experience, can only be understood as an
inscrutability within the most obvious. The theory of the inti¬
mate set in motion with the following microsphere analysis is
dedicated to showing that all human sciences have always
collected contributions to a topological surrealism, because it
was never possible to speak of humans without having to deal
with the various aimlessly wandering poetics of the inhabited
interion The spaces that humans allow to contain them have
their own history—albeit a history that has never been told, and
whose heroes are eo ipso not humans themselves, but rather the
topoi and spheres as whose function humans flourish, and from
which they fall if their unfolding fails.

For many intelligences, the thought of homely intimacies is
associated with a spontaneous disgust at too much sweetness—
which is why there is neither a philosophy of sweetness nor an
elaborated ontology of the intimate. One must assess the nature
of this resistance if one is to get past typical initial aversions.
From a distance, the subject appears so unattractive and incon¬
sequential that for the time being, only suckers for harmony or
theophilic eunuchs would get stuck on it. An intellect that
spends its energy on worthy objects usually prefers the sharp to
the sweet; one does not offer candy to heroes. In the light of this
disposition towards intellectual and existential sharpness, what

9C / Bubbles

AUwOiberknoJeo

Krouzk^oSen

. iink$H4ndto© •
Kleeiblattschiingo

HopNVerfceMmo

Whiteh^ad-Vorketiung

rechtspftndige

Weeblottschjinge

borromaische Binge

Mathematical knots

Thinking i"«e hlerior / 91

could seem more cloying, sticky and unheroic than the demand
to participate in an investigation of the doughy, vague and
humble-matriarchal space in which humans—at first and in
most cases—have settled as seekers of security, good-natured
inhabitants of normality and inmates of contentment institu¬
tions? What would be subject to greater a priori contempt than
the devotion of individuals to their parochial habitat, which
seems to offer them a certain drowsy convenience among them¬
selves? The reason why strong minds usually despise sweetness
can be partly explained by the subversive effects that sweet
things, and sticky things even more, arouse in the proud subject. In
an artful phenomenological micro-drama, Friedrich W. Heubach
made explicit a candy experience that reveals the motives for the
rejection of sweetness. Let us see how this oral drama, after the
core-removing foreplay, the unwrapping of the “sweet-pregnant
oval 11 from its delightful paper shell, moves towards its climax
with the object’s insertion into the mouth of the hero:

The pursed lips seize the candy and release it laboriously into
the oral cavity, where it is finally received by the tongue with
expectant twists. Sweetness unfolds, opens out into a small,
flattering O, and has soon transformed the mouth into a sweet,
stickily and greedily pulsating ball that absorbs more and more
as it expands. One is encircled oneself, and ultimately exists
only as the fine, ever tauter periphery of this ball of sweetness;
one closes ones eyes and finally implodes: taking on the
characteristics of a ball oneself, one forms one object with the
world that has now become round in sweetness.

We now find “outer” events running in parallel with these
“inner” ones: the empty candy wrapper is smoothed out more

9?/ Bun!;:!'-:.

and more until it is a Hat rectangle, which is then rolled around
the finger to form a cylindrical tube and finally folded into ever
smaller surfaces. And when the ball of sweetness begins to lose
its tension, flattens out and falls apart, the paper between the
fingers takes on increasingly disordered and lumpy shapes; and
when the sweetness forms no more than a fine, weakening line
of deprivation, it is finally pressed into a hard little ball and
flicked with relish far into the distance . 38

This reveals a reason for aversions to sweetness. Even the most
harmless oral enjoyment causes something that will remain
unacceptable for the freedom hero: the sweetness-in-me expe¬
rience casts the enjoying subject out of the center and places it,
for a few precarious yet welcome moments, on the fringe of an
autocratic taste sphere. Wanting to resist this small overpowering
would not be a sublime sentiment so much as a laughable one, not
least because, according to the heroic postulate, allowing oneself
to be infiltrated through the consumption of confectionery is
shameful to begin with. The lesson of this incorporation has
lasting effects: intimacy is experienced here as the inside of my
body being broken through by the presence of a taste whose
strength in pleasantness opens me up and forces me into sub¬
mission—that sweeps me out of the way, in fact, because I can
only truly enjoy it by allowing it to make me the fortunate spec¬
tator of its triumphal march through my oral cavity. The most
basic luxury food is suitable to convince me that an incorporated
object, far from coming unambiguously under my control, can
take possession of me and dictate its topic to me. If a banal case
of sugar consumption already hollows out the subject through
the flaring up of an aroma presence, however, and makes it the

TnrWng thdlrcerior / 93

Bela Vizi, Koordination

scene of invasive sensualities, what is to become of the subject’s
conviction that its destiny is self-determination on all fronts?
What remains of the dream of human autonomy once the subject
has experienced itself as a penetrable hollow body?

.94 / Bubcbo

It would seem that, in such questions, the roles of self-will
and rapture are inverted, and that the weakling insists on his
own power while the strong one abandons himself. Should
we not precisely understand the strongest subject as the most
successful metabolic agent—the person who makes the least
secret of his hollowness, penetrability and mediality? Should
not the most decentered individual accordingly be understood
as potentially the most powerful? And did the central psycho¬
logical model of modernity, the ego-strong self-realizer, not
step on the scene as a polyvalent metabolism-maximizer who
surrenders himself to multifarious invasions, seductions and
appropriations under the mask of controlled consumer power?
Does not the entire universe of human intimacy, the web of
divided interiors in the literal and metaphorical sense, grow
from such inversions of appropriative-incorporative gestures?
Do we, as phenomenologists, psychologists and topologists, not
have to start from the observation that from the outset, subjects
always form themselves through the experience of being “taken
at their taking”? The constitutive candy, which epi-Freudian
psychoanalysts have both viewed with suspicion and deified
since the time of Melanie Klein, is none other than “the mothers
breast,” that alleged first “object” (note the singular) which the
child (which is no more able to count to two than an object-
relationship theorist) cannot accept and incorporate without
reaching, in its way, the limits of the milky ball of sweetness
within it. The early subject—should one deem it merely a gleeful
observer on the periphery of a euphoric gulp?

Such considerations have troubling consequences for the
doctrine of the human being, as they break with the illusion of
circulating ego-delimitation systems. The point of this game

Tanking the Interior / 95

on the I-you and I-it boundaries 39 can be clarified via a
mythological thought experiment. If candies and portions of
mothers milk were subjects, not mere things—if they were
benign demons, for example—it would not be extravagant to
claim that they take possession of their consumers, settling
inside them like occupiers who plan to stay for good. This
would undoubtedly be a sound method to deduce the animation
of the infans from its interaction with demons; then receiving a
soul would simply mean becoming involved in a profitable
obsession through spirit contact and productive incorporations.
The notion of demonic possession is not available to a modern
psychological theory, of course, although the circumstances
themselves—the opening and population of a divided intimate
space—are such that a discreet demonology would probably be
its most fruitful interpretation . 40 Is it not, in fact, the whispering
of nymphs* voices to the subject from its earliest states that
unlocks its inner dimensions ? 41 Does not every unneglected
child realize the advantage of being bom only thanks to eude-
monic nipples, good candy spirits, conspiratorial bottles and
drinkable fairies that watch discreetly by its bed, occasionally
entering the interior to nurse it? Does a sum of advantageous
invasions not hollow out a love grotto within the individual,
with enough space to house the self and its associated spirits for
life? Does not every subjectification, then, presuppose multiple
successful penetrations, formative invasions and interested
devotions to life-enriching intruders? And is not every feeling
of offensive self-positing injected with anger over missing the
chance at being taken?

In the eight chapters of this book, we will begin a slow jour¬
ney through the vaults of consubjective intimacy. Here we shall

96 / Bubote

From Evandro Salles, Ten Dreams of Oedipus

discuss, in sequence: the spaces of hysterical heartiness and the
interfacial field; magnetopathic rapport in hypnosis and the
fetal position of amniotic enclosure; placental doubling and the
cultural manifestations of the dual soul; the psychoacoustic
evocation of the self; and finally also theological attempts to
give the liaison between God and the soul an intimo-topological
foundation. The character of the observations made in all these
layers and twists of the shared interior is not, however, merely
that of metaphorical constructs. The interior we shall examine
here has a different structure from that “hall of memory” that
caused Augustine to marvel at how the human spirit contains a
dimension large enough to preserve the trifles of ones own life
story as well as the immeasurable knowledge of God and the
world accumulated by the generations before us. Nor is it like

thinking Ine interior / 97

the submerged part of die iceberg, the tip of which the schools of
depth psychology so like to use when characterizing the human
conscious. The intimate spaces of microspherology are neither
the majestic auditoriums nor the cave-like hiding places of the
individual conscious, which interacts with itself to create spa¬
tial images suitable for understanding the nature of its own
position, spread out between the largest and the smallest.

The category of the intimate discussed here deals exclusively
with divided, consubjective and inter-intelligent interiors in
which only dyadic or multi-poled groups are involved—and
which, in fact, can only exist to the extent that human individuals
create these particular spatial forms as autogenous vessels
through great closeness, through incorporations, invasions,
intersections, interfoldings and resonances (and, in psychoana¬
lytical terms, also identifications). This intimate vault system as
a whole in no way corresponds to the unconscious as under¬
stood in depth psychology, for access to it is gained neither
through a particular listening technique nor the insinuation of
a latent meaning that manifests itself in halting speech, nor
through the assumption of unconscious wish production.
Readers can easily convince themselves that the dimensions of
interiority spread out in this microspherology are, in their
structure, worlds apart from the serial three-room-apartments
of the Freudian soul apparatus. Philosophical interior research
and the psychology of the unconscious only overlap in a few
places, as we shall see; if we occasionally borrow from psycho¬
analytical notions in the following, it is only because the
material permits and suggests it, not because we view the school
as an authority. If we were to invoke a genius for this first part
of the Spheres enterprise, one of the foremost candidates would

98 / Buboios

Ik* Gaston Bachelard, who, with his phenomenology of material
imagination, especially his studies on the psychoanalysis of the
elements, created a valuable store of brilliant insights to which
we shall return on several occasions. In his idea-laden 1948
book La terre et les reveries du repos [The Earth and Reveries of
Rest], the author gathered together diverse material concerning
the dreams of material intimacy: birth houses and dream houses,
grottos, labyrinths, snakes, and above all the aforementioned
Jonah complex, which places every human being who knows
freedom simultaneously into an unmistakable relationship with
an enabling interior darkness. In this work, Bachelard notes
that simply by looking inwards, every person becomes a
Jonah—or, more precisely, becomes prophet and whale in a
single body. The great phenomenologist of the experienced
space did not forget to name the reason for this:

The unconscious is as sure of the closure of the circle as the
most skilled geometrician: if one lets the reveries of intimacy
take their course, [...] the dreaming hand will draw the original
circle. It seems, then, as if the unconscious itself knew a Par-
menidean sphere as the symbol of being. This sphere does
not possess the rational beauties of geometric volume, but it
offers the great securities of a belly. 42

We shall attempt in the following to develop these indispensable
intuitions further. But we will also have to exceed their
boundaries for the purpose of unfolding them, as we need to
explain why the consubjective, intimate sphere can initially by no
means possess a eucyclic or Parmenidean structure: the primitive
mental orb, unlike the beautifully rounded philosophical one,

’hinking the Interior 1 99

does not have a center of its own that radiates and collects
everything, but rather two epicenters that evoke each other
through resonance. Furthermore, it transpires that the inside of
the soul grottos will not always remain exclusively a place of
quiet happiness. The innermost access to your living cell is
often reserved, as we can see, for a voice that wishes to reduce
or deny the possibility of your existence. It characterizes the
basic risk of all intimacy that our destroyer sometimes gets
closer to us than our ally.

100/ Babies

CHAPTER 1

Heart Operation;

Or, On the Eucharistic Excess

The heart was hailed as the sun, indeed as the king, yet closer
inspection reveals no more than a muscle.

— Niels Stensen, Operaphilosophica 1

For Europeans who, even at the turn of the third millennium,
still count their years post Christum natum , it is natural to begin
an inquiry into the basis of the intimate—assuming it is appro¬
priate to the structure of intimacy to speak of any basis—with a
recollection of the human heart. The heart, even in the age of its
transplantability, is still viewed as the central organ of internal¬
ized humanity in the dominant language games of our
civilization. For the primary European intuitions, it is still barely
conceivable how humanity and cordiality could not converge. A
quick glance at ancient and non-European cultures is enough to
teach us that the association of the heart and the innermost self
is no anthropological universal; the heart has by no means been
equated with the deepest interior of humans—one could also call
it the source of their sense of self and their capacity for relation¬
ships—in all places at all times. The views of different peoples on

101

the corporeal seat of the soul diverge to a degree that remains
astounding to European cardiocentrists. They could probably
still communicate with tradition-conscious Chinese and ancient
Egyptians with a degree of consonance; they would find it rather
more laborious to converse with Japanese, who articulate their
notions of the central emotional sphere using two complex
terms: kokoro y meaning “heart,” “soul,” “spirit” or “sense,” and
hara> meaning “belly” or “center of the body.” 2 It would be even
more difficult to reach an understanding with peoples like the
Inuit, who distinguish between three types of soul: the sleep soul,
located at the side of the body under the diaphragm, which
separates from the body when it awakens (this is why one should
begin the morning slowly), the life soul, which resides at the base
of the neck between the torso and the head, and the smaller life
spirits that inhabit the joints. 3 In the domain of Christianity,
however, the personal religion par excellence y the search for the
focus of animation has unwaveringly directed itself at the “organ”
of the heart. Christian language games and emotional disciplines
have spawned a universe of subtle physiologies whose only aim is
to deepen and emphasize the equation of the heart and the cen¬
ter of the sense of self; among Christianized Europeans,
especially in the Middle Ages and early Modern Age, heartiness
is the epitome of affective core subjectivity. Cordial subjectivity
is characterized by its declaration that holding onto its own heart
is an impossibility, or a pathological confinement at best. Hearti¬
ness as such automatically creates complicity and community,
and is consequently interested in concordia> the coordination of
heart rhythms. This suggests, then, that we should begin our
investigation of the twin intimate space with reflections on heart-
historical motifs that cannot deny their roots in Christian models

102/ 3ubijtes

of bodily-spiritual communion. Passing through a sequence of
episodes in which communicating hearts act as the heroes, the
horizon of a radicalized, interpersonal intimate spatiality as
formulated by European theologians, philosophers and story¬
tellers will be made visible in suggestive glances ahead.

First of all we shall give an abbreviating paraphrase of Konrad of
Wiirzburgs well-known Herzmaere [Heart Fable] from the thir¬
teenth century; this will be followed by an episode from the life
of the Italian mystic Catherine of Siena from the second half of
the fourteenth century—we shall quote the legend of her myste¬
rious heart exchange with Christ in the version handed down by
her confessor, Raymond of Capua, in his lives of the saints. As a
third example we will present a passage from Marsilio Ficinos
epoch-making commentary on Plato’s Symposium , De amove
(1469), on the mechanical basis of sensual infatuation. These
metaphysically, religiously and psychologically oriented models
for bipolar cardial relationships will be contrasted with a passage
from La Mettrie’s 1748 treatise on the machine man, which
displays the most pronounced break with the tradition of religious
languages of intimacy. Synoptically viewed, this sequence offers a
provisional indication of the proportions, tasks and breaking
points of a theory of biune intimacy.

Herzmaere , a verse novella by the poet Konrad of Wurzburg,
who died in Basel at the age of sixty-two, is a piece of erotic-
romantic light literature generally thought to date from the
1360s. It deals with the heroically doomed, noble love between a
knight and his lady, both of whom remain nameless and typical
characters in Konrad s tale. Konrads novellistic idea of the eaten
heart probably stems from ancient Indian motifs that return in

Hear Cwa:or: or, O. the Exha'filic txce&s / 1G3

the Greek myth of Pelops and the fairy tale about the Juniper
Tree. The story itself, according to medievalists, was widely dis¬
tributed in medieval France, from where it conquered the whole
of Europe; Boccaccio’s Decameron alone presents two variations
on it. 4 In Konrad s version, the story of the cannibalistic heart
communion is turned into an instrument for achieving a restora¬
tion of courtly love. The poet takes up the motif in order to
glorify high courtly-religious attitudes nostalgically, in a time
when citizens and knights had long been signaling to one another
in a mediocre consensus that the demands placed by the love of
noble souls were too great for them.

A knight and his lady are enamored of each other according to
the laws of high courtly love \Minne\\ their lives and souls
{muot) y we are told in lines 30-32, are so intertwined that their
innermost parts have fully become one {ein dine). The legal
bond between the lady and her lawful husband, however,
damns all the lovers’ hopes of fulfillment to failure. Thus, as
the script of the romantic drama prescribes, their intimate con¬
nection itself becomes a cause of torment and downfall; when
the jealous husband becomes aware of their relationship, he
plans to go with his wife on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepul¬
cher in order to estrange the lovers from each other. The lady
convinces her knight to travel to the orient in her stead. Obe¬
dient to the lady he calls his mistress, the knight agrees to the
bitter task; as a pledge of love, she takes a ring from her hand
and gives it to him to accompany him on his journey. Having
reached the distant land, the melancholy knight seals his terri¬
ble suffering in his heart (lines 244-45) and, after spending a
while wasting away with yearning, he dies abroad. Before his

04 / Bubbles

“Amour"places the kings heart in the hands of“Vif-De$ir, ” from che creacise by King
Rene, I.ivre du Cuer dAmours esprit (Book of the Love-Struck Heart), miniature hv
an unknown illustrator, 1457

death, the knight had entrusted his squire with the task of
cutting the heart “bloody and sorrow-colored” from the knight’s
body, embalming it thoroughly and preserving it carefully in a
shrine, and then bringing it back to the lady in the distant
Occident together with the ring as a mark of identification.
When the squire arrives at the lady’s castle bearing the
embalmed heart, he is confronted by the lord—her husband—
and asked what the precious box contains. After seeing the

Heart Operation; or, On the Eucharistic Excess / 105

heart and the ring and realizing their significance, the man
orders his cook to prepare a dish widi it and has it served to his
wife. “My wife, he spoke to her in a sweet voice, this is a deli¬
cious (< cleine ) meal; you should eat it by yourself, for you
cannot share it” (lines 426-29)* When the lady, having fin¬
ished her meal, declares that she has never eaten anything so
delicious, her husband reveals the recipes secret. At these
words, the womans heart freezes in her chest, blood spills from
her mouth, and she swears that after this noblest of all meals
she will never touch food again. Her heart breaks immediately,
and in dying, the poet tells us, she amply compensates for
everything her lover had done in advance. The poem ends with
a culture-critical word of warning in a time lacking in love: by
recalling the ideals of high courtly love, Konrad praises the two
lovers as an example of perfect mutual devotion.

The novella shows how the classical metaphysical schema of
union out of duality permeated the worldly narrative culture of
the age of chivalry. That the most demanding thought figure in
mystical theology could appear in the profane realm in such a
drastic transposition, that amorous relationships between man
and woman could be modeled on the monastic and mystical
union of God and the soul: this was the dangerously great
achievement of the Arab- and Provencal-inspired medieval
culture of courtly love. One of its daring aspects was the parallel
between erotic and Christological language games and the super¬
elevation of sexual desire through the metaphysical idea of union.
What takes place here between the lovers as the courtly love of
the heart from a distance and the consumption of the heart up
close transposes the act of communion into a dimension of

06 / Bubojes

hybridized intersubjectivity; the knights cooked heart forms a
precise equivalent to the host over which the transforming
words hoc est corpus meum are spoken. Instead of the altar, the
kitchen becomes a place of transubstantiation. With the gift of
his heart the knight, seconded by his poet, creates a heretical
variation of the Eucharist. With this act he supports the
hypothesis that to love means to offer oneself up for consump¬
tion by others as a self-wafer. Oblation is not part of eros as
such, however, but of the imperial and feudal idea of service;
and only when, as in medieval Europe, serving and loving had
been radically combined as primal acts of devotion could the
surrender of the heart be noted as a valid erotic record. In the
courtly game—and the court is first and foremost a collection of
staff—the donation of one’s own heart to the only communi¬
cant can present itself as an admirably chivalrous act that aligns
itself with a new, boldly literatized hyper-orthodoxy of erotic
devotion. The law of courtly love neutralized the blasphemous
daring of the eucharistic and union-mystical alliance of man and
woman, surrounding it with the tolerable nimbus of noblest
courtesy. If the ceremonial words of communion state of the
bread that “this is my body,” the novella says of the embalmed,
cooked and eaten heart: “this is my love ” Consequently the
womans husband does not wrong her with his cynical culinary
ruse. On the contrary: even as an unworthy priest, the jealous
husband can have the heart-host prepared and served to her
without any lack of sacramental validity. Consumption by the
woman is the most suitable thing that could happen to a heart
devoted to perfect service. Why else did it travel all the way from
the Holy Sepulcher back to the European castle in its host
shrine if not to be with HER—naturally not without the

Heart Operation; or. On re Eutt-anstic Excess /107

accompaniment of the evidential ring that testifies to the lovers'
union in the shared field of animation.

In its day, the story of the devoured heart came at exactly the
right time to respond to a quandary just discovered by the play¬
ers in the game of courtly love: that for perfect love, as is already
established at the start of the tale, no higher level or future is
possible—only fatigue through physical fulfillment. There are
two options for escaping the inhuman sterility of erotic ideal¬
ism; one leads to monstrous exaltation, the other to the
licensing of base courtly love. Late medieval literature proves, in
a wealth of variations, that both paths were taken. Anyone who
relies on a heightening of events, like the neoconservative poet,
who seeks to combine entertainment through fascination with
moral conversion, must accept the cannibalistic communion as
a valid procedure for elevating the lovers unification to a wild
Eucharist. It is not out of the question that this excess recalls a
forgotten birth of the human awareness of the interior from
anthropophagy. In the opinion of some anthropologists, the
notion of a secret, sinister interior in the human body points
back to an archaic “cannibalistic order,” now all but vanished,
where evil, which manifested itself especially in the guise of the
bothersome fellow human, was supposedly “interned” in the
bellies of the primal hordes members at a shared anthro¬
pophagous meal . 5 The Christian sacrament did not, at any rate,
eschew everything that resembled such terrifying archaisms: for
the Christian world, the community-forming consumption of
God opens up a possibility to practice the impermissible with¬
out remorse in sublimated forms. Among Christians, the
spiritual ingestion of the one God has always been unabashedly
underlined by an act of physical ingestion: they devour that by

106 / Eiubblee

which they themselves wish to be devoured and collected.
Whatever one thinks about the latent connections of Herzmaere
u> eucharistic, theophagous and anthropophagous practices, one
can make out a heterodox voice in history itself that contradicts
the tales manifest edifying intentions. Suffering and death as the
fair reward for true love, and a heart-devouring communion for
the couple in place of amorous days and nights together—in its
pre-arranged discrepancy, this scenario would more likely have
given the courtly audience of the time a morbid thrill than
inspired analogous sublimations. The listeners would sooner
have concentrated on the tales evocative horror than yielded to
its overly lofty edifyingness. When the heart of the beloved,
instead of finding its counterpart in the womans bosom while
still alive, reaches a unto mystica with her innards, the worldly
ear hears in such movements not only the subversive Christo-
logical parallelisms, but most of all revels in the novellistic
monstrosity of such a gastric theology. Here it is precisely love
that appears as the religion of a world standing on its head. The
didactically monstrous aspect indicates how the path to biune
intimacy in advanced civilization is hampered by mistaken
embraces. Is it not part of being erotically experienced, however,
to know that the desire to enter the other can lead one to the
wrong entrance?

In the following account, the intimate transaction is heightened
into a direct exchange of heart for heart. Catherine of Siena, the
stigmatized Patrona Italiae , was born in 1347 as the twenty-fifth
child of a poor dyer couple in Siena, and died in 1380 at the ideal
Jesuan age of thirty-eight. When the Dominican Tertiary receives
the heart of the revealed Christ from him to replace her own, this

Heai’ Openaw'i c*r, On the buchanstie Excess i 1G9

exchange mirrors more than simply the heart-to-heart conversa¬
tion of religious friendship books. The scene described seeks to
testify to an existential hysterectomy that is inconceivable with¬
out the delighted horror of a literal mystico-physiological
transformation. We shall quote the decisive passage from Ray¬
mond of Capua’s La vita di Santa Caterina da Siena :

Once, when she was praying to the Lord with the utmost
fervour, saying to Him as the Prophet had done, “Create a
clean heart within me, O God, and renew a right spirit within
my bowels,” and asking Him again and again to take her own
heart and will from her, He comforted her with this vision. It
appeared to her that her Heavenly Bridegroom came to her as
usual, opened her left side, took out her heart, and then went
away. This vision was so effective and agreed so well with what
she felt inside herself that in confession she told her confessor
that she no longer had a heart in her breast. He shook his head
a little at this way of putting it, and in a joking way reproved
her; but she repeated it and insisted that she meant what she
said. “Truly, Father,” she said, “in so far as I feel anything at all,
it seems to me that my heart has been taken away altogether.

The Lord did indeed appear to me, opened my left side, took
my heart out and went away.” Her confessor then pointed out
that it is impossible to live without a heart, but the virgin
replied that nothing is impossible to God, and that she was
convinced that she no longer had a heart. And for some time
she went on repeating this, that she was living without a heart.

One day she was in the church of the Preaching Friars,
which the Sisters of Penance of Saint Dominic in Siena used to
attend. The others had gone out, but she went on praying.

110 / Buboies

Vltv

Anonymous (15 th century); Lo scam bio del cuori [The Exchange of Hearts], pen
and ink drawing from Libellus dc Sapplemento , Siena City Library

Finally she came out of her ecstasy and got up to go home. All
at once a light from heaven encircled her, and in the light
appeared the Lord, holding in His holy hands a human heart,
bright red and shining. At the appearance of the Author of

Heari Operation; or On tfie Eucharistic Excess /ill

Light she had fallen to the ground, trembling ail over, but He
came up to her, opened her left side once again and put the
heart He was holding in His hands inside her, saying, “Dear¬
est daughter, as I took your heart away from you the other day,
now, you see, I am giving you mine, so that you can go on liv¬
ing with it for ever.” 6

Here too, in keeping with the law of similarity, two intimate
elements are made equal in a daring exchange. Compared to
Herzmaere> the stakes have been noticeably raised: the exchange
is not of one human life for another, but of a human heart for
Gods heart. In this exceptional mystical situation, the meta¬
physical asymmetry between the two poles seems almost to have
been removed. Man is no longer simply Gods work or vassal; the
distance that the individual soul lags behind its transcendent
foundation seems mysteriously to have been caught up. Through
a scarcely analyzable immersion in inward—here the compara¬
tive is important: more inward—relationships* man suddenly
becomes the comrade, co-subject, ecstatic accomplice and same-
aged partner in crime of the absolute. The prerequisite for this
rise to equality is that the human subject feels an excessive
longing for the absolute I-ness of the other, a longing that
cannot fail to be fulfilled. The desire must be excessive, for
without insatiability, it is impossible to break through the
fetishistic object notions of the desired summum bonum —crude
and subtle ones alike—to the fullest extent. Edifying literature
treats this matter formally: only those who are able to “imagine”
God as the purest subjectivity can reach the crucial zone of utterly
de-reified, unimagined subject-being. Consequently the highest
subject, God, can only be “experienced” by adopting His manner

112 / Subotes

of being without imagining anything external. Catherines
cardio-mystical liaison with her Lord at least approaches such
objectless mysteries; at the same time, the drastic heart operation
displays a grotesque physiologism closer to surges of hysteria
than to non-objective immersion.

Clinically speaking, hysteria is—not only among the reli¬
gious—the ability to somatize figures of speech; from a
philosophical perspective, one could say that hysterics are indi¬
viduals who delay their coming-into-the-world until they can
exit into overheated language games; their manner of existence is
the epitome of metaphysical neurosis. The hysterics move without
any interlude, as it were, or after a long period of latency
somewhere inconspicuous, from the womb into the house of
language—or the hall of sounds and grand acoustic gestures.
Through language and gesture, they hope to skip the phase of
pre-linguistic forlornness, the infant trauma, and make it never
have happened. Hence, perhaps, their ability to make verbal
expressions glow in their own bodies. In Catherines case, the
linguistic figure intended to become a physical one was a prayer,
with massive theological preconditions, to be emptied of every¬
thing that was her own: very conventionally, yet at once in an
arousedly personal fashion, the young Sienese nun had requested
that her Lord take away everything in her inner being that
belonged to her. She longed, in keeping with the oldest language
games of Neoplatonic and monastic asceticism, to renounce her
own innards, as it were, in order to become empty in the physi¬
cal and the psychological sense. Her prayer amounts to the wish
to be emptied of all reality that is not successful symbiosis.
Since time immemorial, mysticism has sought to clear out the
crammed intimate zone 7 of the self, whose content can calm, yet

Heart Operation; cr. On re riuraris: c excess / 113

never satisfy the hysterical hunger. Catherines devotion thus has
the purpose of creating a vacuum within her to enable a deep
invasion by the mystical bridegroom.

It would be misguided here to follow the oft-traveled arterial
roads of psychoanalytical sexual theory, which heads for the
genital even in the archaic; the Lord s infiltration of the nuns left
side is simply not coitus via the ribs. Nor, then, is Catherines
great inner other the penetrator who has contrived unusual
entrances to female cavities. Catherine, for her part, is not a
pervert tempting a heavenly lover into cardial intercourse. The
Lord who takes her heart is—at least in the first phase of the
drama—simply responding to the nuns irresistible urge to empty
herself so that she can better enter her other. Once emptied,
hollowed out, gutted, de-hearted, her cavity exerts a suction that
even—no, especially—the God in her does not resist. 8

As soon as Christs heart is implanted in Catherine, it
becomes clear that her own intimate zone had never been the
point; she wants not so much to absorb the other into herself as
to immerse herself in the aura of the other. The inside of the
nuns body serves as a physiological stage on which her wish to
bathe inside the other enacts itself. Her desire is to enter the cave
of a shared selfness. To achieve this, she must somatize that which
is hollow in herself; in her own body, she creates a space whose
suction resolutely forces the life of life, the highest subject.

Catherines case also involves an obvious parody of the
Eucharist, in that she induces Christ to give his worshipper a
special sacrament: Hoc est cor meum . One should also note that
the blessed Raymond of Capua, the saints confessor and biogra¬
pher, who was assigned to her as spiritual supervisor, seems to
have been the supporting accomplice and stimulating accessory

Hea-t Operation; a. On lluanuiiUio / ' 15

to Catherines excesses on the interpersonal or inter-delirious
level. The Catholic monastic milieu has always been a breeding
ground for the folie aplusieurs —this also includes the whispering
of the other nuns, who supposedly saw the scar on Catherine s
left side while bathing. In guarding, envying, deifying and
describing the ailing, hyperactive ecstatic, he became a silent
participant in her ascension to Jesuan symbiosis. Like all biogra¬
phers of saints, who watch their partners with concern while
they are alive and idealize them post mortem , he derived profit
for his own desire to achieve the utmost intensification from
Catherines struggle for unification. It is to his participation in
Catherines participation in the lord of the inner world that
posterity owes one of the most revealing documents on the
phenomenology of the saint in the late Middle Ages. In his
biography he records, among other things, a remarkable breast¬
feeding phantasm in which the Lords wounded heart was
supposedly transformed into an overflowing mamma. In an
earlier vision, Christ is said to have pulled Catherine towards
himself so that she could drink from his pierced side:

And she, finding herself thus near to the source of the fountain
of life, put the lips of her body, but much more those of the
soul, over the most holy wound, and long and eagerly and
abundantly drank that indescribable and unfathomable liquid. 9

The suggestive image of the nun being nursed at the bubbling
fountain of blood may remind us that every deeper penetration
of the intimate world presupposes the transformation of separate
solids into miscible and incorporable liquids.

116 / Bubbles

The notion of the inner world as a mixing jar for liquefied
selves can be further developed using the third example in our
course on the exploration of bipolar intimate spatiality. It takes
us—a century after Catherine of Siena—to the center of the
Platonic revival in Florence, whose key figures were Cosimo de’
Medici (1389-1464) and his young protege Marsilio Ficino
(1433-1499). Cosimo had given Ficino a house in Careggi, near
Florence, in 1462, together with the task of translating the
hermetic writings and the Corpus Platonicum from Greek. This
alliance between a prince and his philosopher not only provided
Western culture with the first modern edition of Plato’s dia¬
logues; in 1469, at the same time as completing his translation
work, Ficino also published the first of his influential commen¬
taries on Plato, Commentarium in convivium Platonis de amore ,
a work of inestimable significance for the modern view of
Socratic or Platonic love. In his dedications, Ficino expressed
the hope that he had written a loving theory of love with this
text, and that, like a theoretical amulet, the book itself might
ensure that no one who read it hastily or reluctantly would ever
understand it:

For one cannot understand the fervor of love with presumptuous

superficiality, and love itself cannot be grasped with hatred.

The work aimed to create by its own means the narrow circle in
which it could be received and appropriated by kindred spirits.
That is why Ficino s book On Love gained an early place of honor
in the literary history of sympathetic magic. It brings to bear the
insight that great books and their sympathizers exist in their own
circle of resonance which the rest of the public, though seemingly

Hear; Ope avor; or. On the EM'i&mc Excess /117

equally able to read them, passes by disinterestedly. The great
book, like the eminent work of art later on, forges its path
through the modern public space and proves itself a sphere¬
forming power of a caliber all its own. Where eminent works
open themselves up generously, those who are unsuited ill-
temperedly exclude themselves.

What Ficino calls commentary is undoubtedly the opposite
of what philologists have wanted the term to mean since the
nineteenth century. Ficino does not offer an obliging word-
for-word explanation of the old text, but rather an unabashed
rewriting of the original that takes the liberty of overlaying the
seven speeches of the Platonic symposium with the same number
of counter-speeches by modern participants at a contemporary
symposium. This takes place on Platos birthday, November 7th,
in Careggi, with the aim of reviving an ancient academic custom
after a twelve-hundred-year interruption. Commentary here
transpires as a method for pouring the wine of the Modern Age
into ancient wineskins. In the seventh speech, given by Cristo-
foro Marsupini, who is assigned the role of Alcibiades, Platos
final speaker, we find the passage that will enrich our cardio-
mythological investigations with a sensational model. Here,
language encounters physical love as toxicosis and enchantment
from afar:

Put before your eyes, l beg of you, Phaedrus the Myrrhinu-
sian, and that Theban who was seized by love of him, Lysias
the orator. Lysias gapes at the face of Phaedrus. Phaedrus
aims into the eyes of Lysias sparks of his own eyes, and along
with those sparks transmits also a spirit. The ray of Phaedrus
is easily joined to the ray of Lysias, and spirit is easily joined

118/ Bubbles

to spirit. This vapor produced by the heart of Phaedrus
immediately seeks the heart of Lysias, through the hardness
of which it is condensed and turns back into the blood of
Phaedrus as before, so that now the blood of Phaedrus, amazing
though it seems, is in the heart of Lysias. Hence each imme¬
diately breaks out into shouting: Lysias to Phaedrus: “O, my
heart, Phaedrus, dearest viscera.” Phaedrus to Lysias: “O, my
spirit, my blood, Lysias ” Phaedrus pursues Lysias because his
heart demands its humor back. Lysias pursues Phaedrus
because the sanguine humor requests its proper vessel,
demands its own seat. But Lysias pursues Phaedrus more
ardently. For the heart can more easily do without a very
small particle of its humor than the humor itself can do without
its proper heart. 10

It is easy to see in this passage how the model of the neighborly-
intimate two-heart-space is overlaid with a quasi-telepathic
component; this component employs the Platonic concept of the
active light and visual rays to establish an equally bizarre and
concrete enchantment, referred to by the author as fascinatio ,
between the hearts of the lovers. According to Ficino, infatuation
appears as the acute form of a malign fascination; this is no
apparition in a vacuum, but the result of a long-distance effect
thoroughly conditioned by a subtle physiology.

To make this telepathic transport plausible, Ficino bases his
arguments on Platonic radiology—that first theoretical formu¬
lation of the idea of causation through radiation, which refers
back to the famous solar parable in The Republic , n The view of
the heart as the sun of the internal organs is equally conven¬
tional: it transfers the Platonic image of the suns kingship in

Heart GperUiui; or On ^ris: c ilxceaa /119

Telepathic radiation causality: Albrecht Altdorfer, The Stigmatization of Saint
Francis , 1507, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation

the world of astral bodies to the heart as the monarch in the
world of animal-human bodies. Platonic kings are naturally sun
kings; de facto , they rule as heart kings who tie even the most
distant points to the center of cardial emanation. In this semi-
mythical physics, both the sun and the heart rule in the mode

120 / L*ubljf©s

of radiation; all forms of emanationism—models of the dis¬
charging of archetypal forces into empty spaces or those filled
with amorphously dark bodies—can be traced back to Plato’s
concept of solar monarchy. In the image of the suns kingly rule,
the thinker set about rendering imaginable the causation of the
sensually experienceable real through the super-sensual most
real, that is, the good that pours out. Where the solar model is
transferred onto the heart, the latter has emanative properties
bestowed upon it.

This radiocracy of the heart defines Ficino s erotic theory; it
inspires the incomparable phantasm of telepathic blood transfu¬
sion through the eyes of Phaedrus into the heart of Lysias. In
fact, Ficino imagines the eyes of the beloved like an active radio
signal that transmits a small, real quantum of blood into the eye
of the lover. This blood transmission is made possible by the
notable circumstance that on the way from the heart to the eye
of the transmitter, the blood is subtilized into steam or fine
vapor , as it were, so the notion that it could be transported out¬
side the body by a visual ray filled with the spirit of life ( spiritus )
can only seem utterly absurd. What makes this path from the
blood to the gaseous form and back again plausible is the well-
known pattern of evaporation and its reversal through
distillation. In the recipient s eye, the haze of vapor between the
eye and the heart can collect again like condensate, enabling
authentic Phaedrus blood finally to reach Lysias’ heart. Having
arrived there, the blood triggers participation-mystical effects: in
its foreign location, it develops a form of longing for its origin,
for it longs to return to the heart from which it came, and
through this striving it magically draws the entire person of
Lysias with it towards Phaedrus.

Hear. Operation; or, Or tha Eucharistic Excess / 121

It is this suction drawing the blood taker to the blood giver
that we call infatuation or enchantment. Base erotic affection
therefore means that a subject is caught up in the atmosphere, and
hence the blood circulation, of another—as if it were once more
a fetus, enclosed in a shared circulation with its mother through
the umbilical cord. It is characteristic of Ficinos time that he was
only able to reproduce one half of this blood symbiosis, namely
the bloods way from the sender s heart to the susceptible periph¬
ery, which is represented here by the second, receiving
eye-heart-system. In the fifteenth century, two significant discov¬
eries concerning the secret of blood circulation had not yet been
made; the organ-theoretical and blood vessel-theoretical image of
the complete circulation, the circulation closed through the
system of veins, was still unknown, and the reconstruction of the
placenta-mediated exchange of blood between the mother and the
fetus was even more remote from what was physiologically and
anatomically conceivable in Ficinos t*me. In fact, more than a
century and a half would pass from 1469 to the first description
of the bloods complete path as a circulation to and from the heart
by the English anatomist Harvey; it was only in 1628 that he
published his groundbreaking treatise Exercitatio anatomica de
motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus y which took modern
anatomy into the mechanics of inner liquid movements. Until
then—in spite of all physiological probabilities—the model based
on the heart as the king of all organs, wastefully giving his blood
to the extremities, remained so dominant that the seemingly
logical notion that the blood sent forth could circuitously return
to the sender was unable to develop. In the age of strong
monarchic ideas, this would have amounted to insulting the
sovereign; for if the circulatory system were complete, one could

122 / EuoUut*

no longer have imagined the king and the heart as absolute givers,
but also as takers of gifts that flow towards them from the
periphery. The center would then no longer be able to rule as the
heart by the grace of God, only as the constitutional heart, which
would have to swear an oath on the constitution of the circulation.

That explains why Ficino can ascribe a form of homesick¬
ness for the origin to the blood of Phaedrus in Lysias’ heart, yet
does not outline any effective way for the spent blood to return
to its source; to explain this, he would indeed have had to
postulate the complete circulation. Hence the sensational blood
transfusion to the lover in Ficinos treatise is only carried out as
a semi-circulation; but it does cause the passionate magnetic
pull that chains Lysias to Phaedrus, as well as making it plausi¬
ble that Phaedrus should also find something attractive about
Lysias. Here, infatuation is in fact no more or less than the
magical action of telepathically spent blood. Above all, however,
this long-distance transfusion offers a new explanation for the
asymmetry between the lover ( erastes ) and the beloved
(i eromenos ), which had formed the subject of inexhaustible
discussions since the days of the Old Academy. It attributes the
inevitable inequality of the erotic interrelation to the fact that
the enchanter and the enchanted cannot be exact mirror images
of each other. According to academic tradition, the lover is
usually an older man of great spiritual qualities who is enchanted
by the captivating appearance of perfection exuded by the
attractive exterior of a noble, vitally superior youth. In Ficinos
exemplary scene, the respected rhetorician Lysias does indeed
love the inexperienced, irresistibly charming youth Phaedrus, to
whose beauty, according to Plato, even Socrates had to pay tribute
on their famous joint excursion before the gates of Athens.

Hear. Oyeiuiioa o\ Go ihe Euararisvc Exo ess /123

As far as our probings in the space of bipolar intimacy are
concerned, the passage from De amore offers a decisive analytical
step beyond the sacramental model underlying both Herzmaere
and the episode with Saint Catherine. It describes the shared
inner sphere between the two mutually attracted hearts in a
quasi-anatomical, rudimentarily biotechnical language as the
effect of a depth-psychological exchange. This proves the
hypothesis that the erotology of the Renaissance progressed
more than halfway to a modern theory of things concerning the
soul; the protagonists of Renaissance psychology had already
realized that the soul cannot be anything other than a studio for
transactions with inspiring others. These achievements of
Renaissance knowledge have, admittedly, been almost entirely
forgotten in our century, and overlaid with scientistically
stylized and usually also individualistically shallowed new
versions of the psychological space. Anyone wishing to over¬
come the founder legends surrounding Freud, Jung and their ilk
and counter with a valid image of the real history of psychody¬
namic knowledge in the Modern Age cannot avoid confronting
at least two major formations of European depth psychology
with the teaching systems of the twentieth century. First of all
the Platonically inspired magological theories of fascination,
which inquired as to the conditions of love, influence, enchantment
and disenchantment using subtle physiological and memory-
theoretical means; 12 bold conceptions of a general magic of
intersubjectivity emerged from the fifteenth century on, 13 but
these were destined to be embarrassed and eradicated by later
systems. Secondly, the mesmerist-magnetopathic universe,
which expanded between 1780 and 1850 into a fully-fledged
depth-psychological classicism; the positivistic Zeitgeist in the

124 / Bubbles

later nineteenth century and the organized forgetfulness of the
Freudian school in the twentieth were its undoing. 14

With a few observations concerning heart-theoretically relevant
thought motifs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we
can perhaps place this exemplary course through the motivic
world of religio-metaphysically coded inwardnesses of the heart
into a perspective that already takes into account the caesura of
modernity. It is said of the Roman priest Filippo Neri
(1515-1595), the “humorous saint" mentioned favorably by
Goethe in his Italian Journey, that when his body was dissected
after death a hand-sized gap was discovered between the ribs
close to the heart, as well as a significant enlargement of the
heart and the coronary artery. Contemporaries attributed these
physical anomalies to Neri s frequent states of rapture, which,
with outward indications of congestive crises, supposedly caused
a heightened flow of blood to the heart and a swelling of the
heart and ribcage; it has been confirmed that Neri suffered
severe tumor-like eversions of the chest near the heart during
prayer, in addition to swellings of the mouth and cheeks when
receiving the host, which gave the impression that he had a gag
in his mouth. Based on these findings, Neri too belongs to the
long line of scriptural somatizers, for whom the mystical text is
translated direcdy into a baroque dialect of the organs. Pente¬
costal motifs and figures of speech conveying Christian
great-heartedness in particular were transported, in Neris case,
into bodily demands for expansion and reaching out.

Such abnormalities could only be handed down in the internal
world of Catholic spiritual physiologies; they found their place
in a well-organized, thousand-year stream of words about the

lean Operation'i, or, On ve Cue ansic Dcoass i 125

Allegory of the lmitatio Christi: Christ offers die soul his open heart for reproduc¬

tion, 1578 copperplate from Anvers, Paris, Cabinet des Estampes

supernatural bodily effects of pious intensities. The realm of
Catholic heart theologies forms a procession of deliria that
formed in late medieval mysticism and grew into a large cultic
movement in post-Reformation times, especially under the
influence of the Sacred Heart mystic Marguerite Marie Alacoque
(1647-1690); in the end, it also forced liturgical concessions and
determined formulations in the teaching profession. Also
drifting in the current of these ecclesiastically administered

125/

phantasms of intimacy, one finds the work of the Normandy-
born Oratorian priest and popular missionary Johannes Eudes
(1601-1680), who went down in the Catholic annals as the
founder of a liturgically significant two-hearts cult. Running
through his extensive output is one of the underlying notions in
modem active mysticism, namely that the Christian life, both in
contemplation and works, must be completely absorbed in God.
Eudes’ inner mission was a battle against the un-Catholic outer
being as the non-interior of God. According to Eudes, the life of
the saints can only be described as a constant floating in the
amniotic sac of the absolute. Eudes introduced a far-reaching
innovation into the repertoire of Catholic heart phantasms when
he augmented the established cult of the Sacred Heart with the
cult of the Heart of Mary. The essence of his commitment to the
Heart of Mary was, in our language, to create a bipolar cardial
heaven in which the heart of the son could fuse with the mothers
in mystical union. From a psychodynamic perspective, Eudes
thus satisfied the long-acute need for a fetalization of post-
Copernican Catholic heaven; according to this doctrine, the
anima naturaliter Christiana was allowed to live as a sharing
third party under the canopy of the dual son-mother heart.
This corresponded to the move in post-Reformation Catholic
psychopolitics to keep individuals fixed not only in the withered
bosom of Mother Church, but also to show them their place in
a metaphysically superelevated, inter-cordial small family.

While the mysticism of the Counter-Reformation became
entangled in increasingly frenetic cardio-theological language
games, medical research at European universities had set in
motion an inexorable anatomical disenchantment of the heart.
Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the once

Mean Operate* *; or, i>. the Eucharistic Excess / 127

&».i

CHRIST I
TESTA-
MENTA

The heart of nature, burning in the fire of wrath, couches the radiant heart

oflove in the world above. Illustration from Jakob Bohme, Theosophische

Wercke , Amsterdam, 1682

128 / Bubptes

Frontispiece from Albrecht von Haller, Elementa PhysiologMe Corporis Humant , 8
vols, Lausanne, 1757-1766, copperplate by P. F. Tardieu after Charles Eisen

frowned-on science of postmortem dissection brought forth a
new conception of the human being as a wondrous manufacture
of the organs. Alongside theologians, doctors now also raised
their voices unmistakably, demanding a public teaching disci¬
pline in matters of human nature. The dissecting tables of the
anatomists were transformed into the altars of the new science of
humans; the corpses graduated as assistant lecturers in anthro¬
pology. They taught authoritatively that humans, above all
relationships to others of their kind, were firstly and ultimately
single, unrelated bodies—bodies that exist in original functional
unity and organismic individuality, only secondarily being inte¬
grated into social groups. Thus one should also consider an
influential anatomical factor among the sources of modern
individualism. The absolutizing of single beings is predicated
not only on modern subject-philosophical motifs and property-

Haan Operation; or, On Te buaarisi'C Exooss / 129

bourgeois interests, but also on that anatomical individualism in
which the human corpse was viewed as an unrelated body. To the
analytical eye of the anatomist, the individual human body
presented itself as an autonomous workshop of life, as it were,
the physiological thing-in-itself. For there is nothing in the
opened-up innards of the corpse that allows a tendency towards
existence in intimate connection with others to come to light.

While Baroque churches filled up with cultic images of
burning hearts in reactionary Catholic countries, anatomists
were putting the feudal heart on trial at a different location. They
launched a cardiological discourse tantamount to pure subver¬
sion by turning the heart from a sun to a machine, demoting it
from a king of the organs to a leading functionary in the blood
circulation. Even if priests like Johannes Eudes were bringing
their cult of the most sacred hearts of Christ and Mary into early
modern masses, this did not prevent his contemporary William
Harvey from finding out the trade secrets of the desanctified
heart. One hundred and fifty years after Harveys breakthrough,
the process of cardiological disenchantment had progressed
sufficiently far for Romantic rehabilitations of the lost cardio-
magical world to appear on the horizon; by the early nineteenth
century, the general cooling-off process had reached such a pre¬
carious level that it had to bring about the cordial restoration,
shaped in Germany primarily by Wilhelm Hauff with his period-
critical fairy tales of the cold heart. 15 Since then, the struggle for
the calibration of the world s temperature has been one of the
dramaturgical constants of literary and mass-medial modernity.
After the shift from the absolutist to the bourgeois age, a willing¬
ness to interpret the world and life as a whole in the central terms
of physiology and mechanics grew among a broad range of

130/ Bu botes

middle-class intellectuals, not least doctors, engineers, oppor¬
tunists and men of letters, and, in the course of an inevitable
counter-differentiation, minds of a synthetic-holistic orientation
asserted the thermal rights of cooled-down and over-publicized
inner worlds.

Among the exponents of the new anti-metaphysical men¬
tality, the doctor, philosopher and satirist Julien Ofifray de La
Mettrie (1709-1751) stands out for the ironic radicality and
aggressiveness of his mechanistic concept of the world and
human beings. Even among the more liberal of his contempo¬
raries, La Mettries anarcho-skeptic temperament made him an
outsider accused of fostering physical and moral excesses.
When his position became unsustainable even in free-thinking
Holland following the anonymous publication of his scan¬
dalous text Uhomme machine by the Leiden publisher Elie
Luzac in autumn 1747, he took refuge at the court of Frederick
II of Prussia, where he adopted the role of an Epicurean-
atheistic court jester. According to the salacious legend, he died
after excessive consumption of truffle pat£. His treatise on the
human machine—which many considered the most loathsome
book of its century—offers samples of the new style of thought,
which has no inhibitions about translating matters of the soul
into the language of mechanism without any noteworthy
residue. Here anatomical naturalism forged ahead as the central
anthropological and psychological discourse. According to this
new science, the first thing one needs to know about the soul is
that the word “soul” is an empty one. La Mettries book is full
of cardiological and gynecological motifs that all break with the
traditional mystery language of inwardness. We shall quote a
passage from a longer argument which the author uses to show

Hear Operator; or , Q*’ the Exha^stic Excess /131

First blood transfusion from an animal (lamb) to a human by the Parisian doctor
Jean-Bapciste Denis

1 32 f

that one should by no means cite spiritual, non-physical phe¬
nomena to explain the independent movements of muscles and
organs; a long list of empirical observations is presented to
support his thesis that the organs and fibres of human and animal
bodies have motivating forces— ressorts —which are responsible
for their autonomous movements.

5. A frogs heart moves for an hour or more after it has
been removed from the body, especially when exposed to the
sun or better still when placed on a hot table or chair. If this
movement seems totally lost, one has only to stimulate the
heart, and that hollow muscle beats again. Hervey made this
same observation on toads.

6. Bacon of Verulam in his treatise “Sylva Sylvarum” cites
the case of a man convicted of treason, who was opened alive,
and whose heart thrown into hot water, leaped several times,
each time less high, to the perpendicular height of two feet.

7. Take a tiny chicken still in the egg, cut out the heart
and you will observe the same phenomena as before, under
almost the same conditions. The warmth of the breath alone
reanimates an animal about to perish in the air pump.

The same experiments, which we owe to Boyle and to
Stenon, are made on pigeons, dogs and rabbits. Pieces of their
hearts beat as their whole hearts would. The same movements
can be seen in paws that have been cut off from moles. 16

It is immediately clear that, with this text, we have left the zone
of bipolar intimacies in general and the religious heartland in
particular, both in the content and the style of the passage. It is
especially the content of argument 6 that recalls the theater of

Heart Operation, or, On re Eucharistic Excess /133

terror which the territorial states in the Europe of the early
Modern Age often employed to stage their punitive power. 17 The
removal of the living heart was in fact carried out frequently on
traitors and rebels, for example during the execution of the aris¬
tocratic conspirator Grumbach in Gotha in 1567; his heart was
not burned, however, but used to strike him in the face. 18 As
these acts of public cruelty were not Aztec sacrifical rituals, 19 but
rather gestures to demonstrate the jurisdiction of Christian
regimes, the desire for a closer decription of the punitive ritual
has adequate motives. It undoubtedly offered an answer to a
form of injustice that was understood as a violation of the life-
world itself—a crime against the sacred public sphere of the state.
The fact that perpetrators of high treason in particular were
punished in this way shows how the attack on the heart of the
political order was responded to with a counter-attack on the
heart of the attacker. This most of expressive of all punishments
casts the delinquent out of the cardial space of society; not by
falling back on the archaic method of banishment, but rather by
removing the evildoer by turning him into a sacrificial victim on
the inside of the political sphere. This shows that the political
sphere, unlike the intimate, cannot be a space of mere biune
intimacies. But because, in times of absolutist monarchy and the
rule of landed nobles, each subject is nonetheless called upon to
enter a personally tinged relationship with the lord of the political
sphere, treason can be experienced and punished as a crime of the
heart against the authorities; to the lords of the manor in the
early Modern Age, it was an attack on the personal life secret of
the political space—the expectation of concordia . That is why the
spheric felon is theatrically drawn into the center and expelled
from the middle of the political sphere into a shameful outside.

134 / Bubbles

The gesture of banishment from the circle of the living and the
suved is certainly a general implication of executions and excom-
iminications; in this hysterical form of capital punishment, the
act of expulsion from the cardial space of shared life is displayed
especially garishly. It expresses that death and the outside mean
the same thing in this world of sentiments.

If the punitive ritual mentioned by La Mettrie with reference
to Bacon brings an expressive outside into play, the philosophers
argumentation itself contains a methodical or conceptual outside
that extends further than the cruel rite. The author envisages the
muscular and vascular system that is the heart in anatomical
abstraction; taken as an organ per se, it is essentially no more for
him than an isolable piece of organic tissue. This tissue does not
in itself possess any intersubjective dimension, but only an auto¬
matic potential for motion, a bundle of departments that realize
themselves, depending on the favorable or unfavorable nature of
circumstances. Understood in this way, a heart—whether cut out
or in its natural place—is automatically located in an externality
that does not belong to any intimate self-field and cannot be
reached by any breath from a human sphere. Its existence in
accordance with its own mode of being as an organismic
machine in a context of cooperating machines of the same kind.
Because La Mettrie is not a follower of metaphysical dualism,
however, he does not make his enlightened subject spook about
like a Cartesian ghost inside a bodily apparatus; it is itself a
function of the machine that it is—a machine that produces an
experienced inside at the same rime as unexperienced physiological
processes. Through this radical machine theory, intimacy is
declared an effect of that outside in which all “machines,”
whether mechanisms or organisms, have always resided. The

HealOperation; pc. 'On ihe Eucharistic Excess /135

imagined body is not an element within either an interior or an
experienced space of proximity, but rather a place within a
homogenized, geometric position spatiality 20 For what is anato¬
my but the enforcement of position-spatial physical concepts in
the former corporeal darkness, an enforcement that first of all
turns every living body into a black box for every other? What we
call intimate relationships are undoubtedly possible between
such machine men, but these do not initially change the fact that
the radical-materialistic theory of the being-isolated of bodies
must allow their relationships amongst themselves to precede it.
Relationships between machine men are, for their part, mechanical
processes; these may have an experienced side, but in terms of
their imagined nature they belong entirely to the outer realm.

La Mettries outside, however, does not—as the humanistic
interpretation claims with horror—want to be the door through
which we exit to the realm of the dead and the foreign, but
should rather be grasped as the field of a human freedom that
must be conquered anew and understood in a different way. In
his writings, the philosopher celebrated the joy of being an
enlightened machine because he thought he had found—in the
particular nature of the machine—a possibility to satisfy the
interest in well-understood human freedom. He placed emanci¬
patory hope in the vision that machines which sufficiently
understand themselves would emerge from the fog of imaginary,
religiously veiled slavery, which from a sensualistic point of view
means: into a life full of pleasures, unsuppressed by any conven¬
tional religious morality. This marked the advent of an ethic of
intensity. “The soul is clearly an enlightened machine (Voila une
Machine bien eclairee ).” 21 For La Mettrie, reaching this outside
was the precondition for all emancipation; while the inwardness

136 / Bobctes

horn of theology simply shows how we are supposed to entrap
ourselves through inhibitions, fears and privations, exteriority
opens up before us as a field on which we can expect the truly
living, the intense, the event-like other that transforms and
releases us. This motif has survived to this day in the radical,
non-dialectical materialisms of French philosophy, especially in
the philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze. 22 To rescue his happy
machine, La Mettrie abandoned the concepts of God and the
soul and set about re-dissecting their sultry accretions.

In the course of this operation, the philosopher lost sight of
a central question, namely whether his anarchically cheerful
machines should not be structured differently from solitary
automata; even after suppressing the metaphysical ideas of God
and the soul, it could have become a problem for the author that
machines, if they are humans, always function in relation to
others—and not only in the phase of initial adjustment conven¬
tionally known as socialization or upbringing. For personal
machines too, it would make sense to suppose that they can only
be successfully kept going in bipolar, multipolar coexistence and
an inter-intelligent parallel circuit. La Mettrie could have noticed
that human machines consistently function in ensembles, and
that only those which succeed in replacing interaction with
present social machines through non-human augmentative
media—such as mirrors, books, cards, musical instruments or
pets—are capable of separation. De Sade at least put together lust
machines from several individuals in his erotic arrangements,
albeit only in mechanical copulations where humans are no more
than prefabricated parts capable of pleasure.

Modern mechanistics are not alone, however, in their diffi¬
culty to conceive of beings for whom entanglement with their

Heart Operation; or. On the EuchanStic Excess,/137

own kind forms the central motivation. When, in the early phase
of the theological process that elevated Christianity to intellectual
supremacy, the concern was to formulate the incarnation of God
conceptually, theologians also faced the problem of correctly
defining how far God s descent to the human level extended. It
took centuries for the second nature of Christ, his human gravity
and psychosomatic capacity for suffering, to win out over the
docetic or spiritistic temptation to understand the God-man
simply as a manifestation from above. Only after dogma batdes
with heavy losses was it officially agreed that for God, the way
into flesh involved birth by a genuine mother—or, extended in
modern terms, also via early symbiosis, the unconditional depen¬
dence on ego formation in successful interactions with others
and, in the event of their factual failure, via religious psychosis.
If God desires to become human, He can only realize His second
nature in a defective human being or a madman who declares
himself the Son of God. As the machines transformation into a
human being has been a task for thinkers since the seventeenth
century, one should also demand that machines take up the cross
of human nature. The machine can only realize its second nature
in the madmen who reveal themselves as incarnated machines
capable of suffering, and hence defective. Today it is humans, as
non-trivial ontological machines, who have to meet the standards
of a dual nature doctrine. Homo totus, tota machina . Mysteries of
a kind all their own grow in a technological culture: is it not
reasonable to admit that I'homme machine and la femme machine ,
by embracing and letting each other go, pose more riddles for
each other than inter-intelligent machines can, for the time
being, solve? Machine from machine, man from man.

138 / Boobies

CHAPTER 2

Between Faces

On the Appearance of the In ter facia I
Intimate Sphere

And chat behind Orpheus' laments shines the glory of having
seen, however fleetingly, the unattainable face at the very
instant it turned away...

— Michel Foucault* “The Thought of the Outside” 1

The Theban Lysias stares open-mouthed into the face of Phae-
drus, while the latter, the beautiful youth, turns his eyes against
those of Lysias, sending out a gaze pregnant with bloody vapor. 2
In the scene described by Marsilio Ficino, the mutual infatuation
of the two model Greeks begins with an optical encounter, an
infectious face-to-face. What will create a visceral alliance—or,
more precisely, an erotic toxemia—between the two protagonists
must begin with an exchange of glances in a space of openness.
The one-to-one space must already be open before the radically
intimized two-heart sphere can be lifted out of it. The two poi¬
soned and enamored parties have left the interfacial public space
in order, devouring each other face to face, to immerse them¬
selves in each other in a magically symbiotic fashion. If one
wanted to restrict ones view to the exceptional erotic situation in

139

order to explore the nature of the intimate, however, one would
be distracted by the normal forms of intersubjectivity in which
individuals see and hear one another while in full possession
of their delimiting powers; for pre-bourgeois times, one
should probably also assume a mutual perception of odor as an
unavoidable indication of presences within the space of encoun¬
ters. Where the paths of individuals cross in everyday interaction,
the sight of the other offers them an opportunity to note that
they do not normally lose their composure merely through a
glance at the individual. It is more likely that this act of seeing
will assure the seer of his secure position in the middle of his own
surrounding space; it affirms him in his distantial, non-merging
forms of intercourse with the protagonists and opponents who
populate his human environment. “I am I and you are you; I am
not in the world to meet the expectations of others; and if we
meet by chance, that is fine; if not, there is nothing to be done
about it” Our first model analyses have detached themselves
forcefully from this brutal orthodoxy concerning the normal dis¬
tance between Me and You on the open market of chance contact
in order to plunge directly into intersubjective states of emer¬
gency. The suspicion might arise that we have broken through to
the fusionary-ecstatic level much too quickly while approaching
the dyadic sphere. The anthropophagous communion, the
mystical exchange of hearts, the telepathic transfusion in an
erogenous two-person blood circulation—these were models for
encounter excesses beyond the personal melting point; our inter-
cardial scenes describe the final stages of relationships in which
individuals are already sharing their innards with each other. In
the fusionary-dyadic models described, the level of everyday
distanced relationships between Me and Them was broken

140 / Bubbles

ill rough in sudden excesses; without any preparation, a sultry
cosmos opened up that refused to allow any distances or free
spaces between persons. Without uncovering premises, we dived
into a cavernous world for two whose protagonists hum along
with the melodies of the others with their eyes closed, on this side
of the handshake, the conversation and eye contact. Each time,
i he fusion between the two connected parties turned out so
intense that it initially remained impossible to say from which
primal scenes of communion such participations in one another
could have been transferred to the current scenes. Hence, in the
following, we must step back from such eyeless interaction in
fantastic, shared abdominal cavities so that the encounter
between two parties in the standard situation of mutual percep¬
tion—seeing each other in the public light—can begin. Here we
can discover that even the seemingly distanced and distance-
affirming optical encounter with the other can contribute
something to producing a bipolar world of intimacy. (We shall
speak of the acoustically intimate in a later chapter.) 3 For the
human feces, as remains to be shown, are themselves creations of
a unique field of intimacy in which the regarding is modeled by
the regard.

Lysias, the Theban rhetorician, stares open-mouthed {inhiat)
into the face of his lover Phaedrus: the beauty of his young
friend places the lover in a state of painful intoxication. He
feels the urge to be close to his beloved, even if he does not
understand himself what exactly he desires of the youth. As the
names reveal, Ficino based the models used in the relationship
theater of his analysis on Platonic examples. According to
Plato, the sight of the beautiful causes a memory shock that
propels the beholder beyond his normal views of the trivial

Between Faces /14*

world of things and people. In select moments, amidst a thousand
everyday sights of objects, human bodies and circumstances,
shapes flare up and enchant the soul. In the disquiet over such
sights, the seer feels transposed to a different stage. He senses
that in the current manifestation, whether a human face or a
work of art, a primal sight is reaching for him and taking him
out of the everyday. “Whoever has fully gazed at beauty / is
already marked for death” (August von Platen, “Tristan”).
Plato seems to have been certain that the unease caused by the
sight of beauty breaks open a memory store hidden in every¬
day life: erotic fear points to an elsewhere from which the
subject originally comes, and which places it in a painful state
of homesick tension when it re-encounters beauty. Where this
longing is clear with itself about its nature, it transpires as a
trace of the memory of prenatal visions. This is what Plato
makes his Socrates explain in the dialogue Phaedrus :

But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spec¬
tator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he
sees any one having a godlike face or form, which is the expres¬
sion or imitation of divine beauty; and at first a shudder runs
through him, and some “misgiving” of a former world steals
over him; then looking upon the face of his beloved as of a god
he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being thought
a downright madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to
the image of a god; then as he gazes on him there is a sort of
reaction, and the shudder naturally passes into an unusual heat
and perspiration; for, as he receives the effluence of beauty
through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms. 4

142 / Bubol&s

Plato's achievement lies in providing, at the same time as his aes¬
thetic theory of the beautiful body, a speech on the shock caused
by the beautiful face. Socrates' reference to the “godlike face”
( theoeidesprosopon) is the earliest trace of a philosophical reflection
that develops in the court of human faciality. For Plato, the face
of the beautiful beloved does not represent the person himself or
the inner part of the fair-faced youth; the beautiful one is simply
a medium for the beauty that illuminates him, the privileged or
truthful body We learn from Plato that in the beautiful human,
as in other beautiful things of the body and beautiful sights, a pre¬
human radiance of perfection reveals itself in the desired purity
before our melting eyes. The most beautiful human body, then, is
the most transparent, the one with the least will and darkness of
its own, the one most pervaded and illuminated by goodness.
Where something like the young Phaedrus appears, a sunrise is
repeated in facial translation in the world of the senses. The lucency
of his face is thus not his proprium ; it remains the property of the
sun-like first and good from which, according to Plato, everything
which seems well formed and accomplished in the sensory world
lights up and flows forth. Falling in love with Phaedrus means
yielding to a truth. This intelligent re-rapprochement with the
prenatally observed metaphysical sun corresponds to the erotic
heat wave that melts the darkened, chilled human body and
releases a pathos-laden recollection of ancient blisses. For the
philosopher, the shock of the beautiful face equals the emergency
situation of nuclear radiation. For in the noble visage, as with all
well-formed bodies, the form-creating light that shines in from
the other side is not fully absorbed by the dark matter. Projected
through a transparent screen of flesh, as it were, the transcendent
light falls into the dulling material world to which our intelligence

Between Pacos /143

is temporarily confined. Hence, for Plato, beauty is always
epiphanic and diaphonous, revelatory and full of radiant power. A
godlike face such as that of Phaedrus is the diapositive of an
invisible sun that, following the idealistic reform, is no longer
called Helios but rather Agathon. Whoever exposes their naked
eye to this illuminating perfection is thrown into an erotic daze
that constitutes a form of clairvoyance.

Admittedly, if Plato had not connected the real facial
appearance to a soul-shaking look on the part of the observer, his
suggestion for a philosophical cult of the beautiful human face
would, precisely by assigning the beautiful as such to a transcen¬
dent source of light, stop in a fatal manner at the abstract
semblance, having to cover the individual face completely with
the impersonal facial ideal. In grasping the facial appearance and
the deep opening of the eye under the spell of the face opposite
as elements that belong together, Plato becomes the discoverer of
the drama, unrepresentable and scarcely ever considered before
or since, that has always taken place between human faces. The
discovery that feces can do something to each other which brings
questions of truth and participation into play is taken up by Fici-
no; his account of the fascinogenic eye contact between Lysias
and Phaedrus constitutes the first attempt in modern philosophy
to describe the interfacial space in such a way that it no longer
appears as a vacuum, or as something neutrally intermediate.
Following Platos trail, Ficino presents the space between the
faces as a force field filled with turbulent radiations. In this field,
each of the facial surfaces turned towards each other works on its
opposite number in such a way that it can only open itself up to
a human-historical faciality through its being-for-the-other-face.

144 / Bubbles

As early as a century and a half before the Platonic revival in Flo¬
rence, painters of the early Modern Age had begun to elevate the
interfacial space to observation as a reality in its own right.
Nowhere did this pictorial discovery of human faces turned
towards each other take place as resolutely and completely as in
the Cappella degli Scrovegni, the Arena Chapel in Padua. In
these Frescoes, which were probably completed before 1306,
Giotto wrote down an alphabet of interfacial configurations. In
dozens of scenes from sacred history, he unfolds a screen for
pictorial events that is covered in mutually illuminating human
faces as the firmament is covered in constellations. Giottos two
most profound studies on the biblical face-to-face motif are in
the cycle of scenes on the birth of Mary and in the passion cycle:
Saint Annes greeting of Joachim at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem
and the kiss of Judas. In these two kiss scenes, Giotto presents the
most sublime pictorial attempts towards a metaphysics of the
facial encounter.

According to art historians, the painter based his scenes from
Marian history on the Protoevangelium of James, 5 as well as the
group of tales On the Birth of Mary from the Legenda aurea .
Jacobus de Voragine, the Archbishop of Genoa who died in
1298, relates in his collection of myths about Christian saints
that Marys parents, Joachim and Anne, were still childless after
twenty years of marriage despite being God-fearing people. One
day, Joachim decided to travel to Jerusalem for Hanukkah in
order to make a sacrifice before the altar of Yahwe and ask for the
child they so desired. There he was recognized by the priest, who
expelled him from the temple in a fit of rage because he was
cursed by the law, which made no provision “for a sterile man,
who made no increase to the people of God, to stand among men

Between Faces /145

:W.

Giocto, Legend of Saint Joachim, Meeting at the Golden Gate , fresco

who begot sons.” 6 Marked by shame, Joachim henceforth avoids
the company of the zealots and seeks refuge in the desert among
shepherds. One day, an angel of the Lord appears to him and
announces that his wife Anne will bear a child, which they are to
call Mary—the later mother of the Messiah; Joachim should
return to Jerusalem, the angel continues, where his wife will meet
him. Anne is immediately visited by an angel who tells her what
he has revealed to Joachim. Giottos painting reproduces the
moment when Anne, already expecting Mary, welcomes her
returning husband at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem:

146 / Bubo lea

So they met as the angel had predicted, and were happy to see
each other and be sure they were to have a child/

Giotto set this legendarily idealized and novellistically animated
scene on a small bridge in front of the Golden Gate. Joachim and
Anne lean towards each other and kiss in a delicate embrace, each
knowing the secret of the other. Atop their heads is a golden
double halo, placed around the chosen couple like an exact
painterly explication of their spheric communion. From the
observers perspective, Joachims face is a little in front of Saint
Annes, so that the male contribution to this extraordinary kiss
overshadows the female by a trace. It is no coincidence that this
is the kiss with which Joachim accepts his unconceived daughter
Mary as his own coming child; it is a kiss that, in paternal
resignation, replaces conception with greeting. Joachim
embraces a mother who carries a child of unknown, that is to say
divine origin within her; Anne, for her part, greets a man who
has abandoned his own pretensions as a begetter for the sake of
the future—it goes without saying that these parents have the
function of prefiguring the later alliance of Joseph and Mary.
Their faces form a shared circle of happiness: they float in a bipo¬
lar sphere of intimate mutual recognition based on shared hope
and a joint plan for a fulfilled time. Their faces convey the respec¬
tive knowledge of two human beings about the merit of the
other. With their kiss, Anne and Joachim acknowledge each
other as communicating vessels with eminent fates and tasks.

Giotto captured the fruitful moment of this encounter like a
quick-witted observer. The partners in his chosen couple do not
greet each other in a world devoid of people: there are six witnesses
standing around the highlighted scene, storing the image internally

Between Faces /147

Giotto, Legend of Saint Joachim , Meeting at the Golden Gate , derail

as they gaze upon it with profane eyes. It is not only the beholder
who perceives what the painter wants to be seen; the picture itself
is full of eyes that are present at the event depicted and draw it
into an image-immanent public domain. As a painter, Giotto is
thus more of a novella writer than a teller of legends; his salva¬
tion history is more reminiscent of a newspaper from the Holy
Land than a monastic tome. His scenes unfold not before the
eyes of mystery theologians and hermits, but those of an urban
and courtly society that scarcely pays attention to the differences

148/ Bubbles

between sacred and profane history in its choice of conversational
matter. The novella, like modern society, lives off what is inter¬
esting. What the pictures viewers observe is thus also seen by the
bystanders in the picture. Forty years before Boccaccio, Giotto
rediscovered the eyes human right to entertaining sights; in the
spirit of the novella, he anticipates the modern, convivial division
of knowledge about events that stimulate our affective and
participatory intelligence. The frescoes manifest a narrative
vitality that exceeds the horizon of their written sources, espe¬
cially simplistic legend literature, and moves towards a world set
in motion by the advent of the Modern Age. One is tempted to
claim that even Giotto already placed the principle of entertain¬
ment for the eye above the law of religious contemplation. This
is especially clear at the hot spot of the greeting painting; for
where the faces of the holy couple meet, the painter creates a
third face through a sleight of hand. One can perceive it by with¬
drawing ones gaze from the two main figures and focusing, from
a decentered perspective, on the area between the two faces.
Once one has recognized them, the features of this visible-
invisible third figure keep appearing when one looks at the
picture again—they are certainly eerie and slightly deformed, yet
nonetheless clear in their presence, like an allusion to the new life
that is starting to awaken in Annes body. It is not a childs face
that results from the union of the parents’ faces, and one is more
inclined to think of their grandchild Jesus than their child Mary.
From a hermeneutical perspective, this emergent third face could
be read as the climax of an artistic effort to translate didactic
scenes of popular Marian theology into speaking images. In aes¬
thetic terms, the new face breaks its pious mold and reclaims an
originally pictorial prerogative: making the invisible visible. This

Between Faces /149

testifies to a birth of the wonderful from the interfacial space. In
this and only this space it is true, as Levinas said, that encoun¬
tering a person means being kept awake by a riddle. The painters
of the early Modern Age were, it would seem, the first to take
note of this keeping-awake of humans through the face that is
turned towards them.

In the scene of the kiss of Judas, the viewer encounters a
painting in which the space between two human faces is charged
with extreme, antithetical spheric tensions—it is the fourth
painting in the twelve-part series of passion scenes, following the
betrayal, the Last Supper and the anointing of feet. In this
fresco, which presents both figures in profile, Giotto developed
a threefold difference between Christ and Judas. The rupture
between them concerns not only the distance separating each
individual in the mass of mortals from every other; rather, it tears
open the anthropological continuum between the persons in
three ways and assigns them to radically divergent ranks and
places of being. As the simultaneous portraitist of Christ and
Judas, Giotto becomes the painter of anthropological difference.

On the first level, the God-man and the mere man are
standing face to face. Here, as in all frescoes from the Scrovegni
cycle, Giotto uses haloes resembling golden helmets to set the
saints and Christ Himself apart from the non-luminous, com¬
mon mortals. The painter uses this conventional stylistic device
to comment on the metaphysical reason for the inequality
between the figures: he depicts the saints in the world like divine
actors in an earthly comedy. He thus creates a pictorial manifes¬
tation of the theological idea of the secret of injustice, which
posits the impenetrable distinction between the elect and the
profane; through the aureoles, he gives the mysterium iniquitatis

i50 / Bubbles

Botween Faces /15:

Giotto, Kiss of Judas

a place in the visible realm. On the second level, Judas and
Christ stand facing each other in real presence as the noble and
the vulgar human. To underline this difference, Giotto fell back
on common physiognomic traditions; his Christ surpasses Judas
not only in height and in the well-balanced beauty of his head,
in which the noble proportions of the forehead and the middle
and lower portions of the face serve to maintain equilibrium,
but also through his aristocratic posture, which displays a hint
of condescension towards Judas, who is stooped in an almost

bestial manner and looking up deviously. In a physiognomic
interpretation of this facial constellation, Rudolf Kassner pointed
out the menacing indentation in Judas profile between the fore¬
head and nose; “This evil angle indeed has a terrible meaning:
that the mental faculties are separated from those of the soul.” 8
Giotto undoubtedly apollonized his Christ, presenting him in
the light of Western European ideas of aristeia\ Judas, by con¬
trast, faces him as a sly Eastern plebeian with base drives and
disharmonic features.

The decisive difference between Christ and Judas in Giottos
painting, however, is neither the metaphysical difference
between the God-man and the unblessed mortal nor the phys¬
iognomic difference between the noble and the common man.
In his depiction of the eye contact between the two figures,
Giotto renders a third, spherologically relevant difference
visible, and only here does it become clear why an intimate
alliance between the two protagonists is impossible. Christs
gaze, questioning and knowing at once, shows an open, sphere-
forming power that would even reintegrate the traitor into its
space if he were able to enter it; in Judas, however, he sees the
embodiment of a greedy isolation that, even in close physical
proximity to the other, cannot become part of the shared space.
Thus Judas kisses what he cannot attain, and his kiss becomes
the obscene gesture of one who infiltrates the space of love with
the attitude of one who does not belong. Saint Augustine would
have said: he is curled up like a thief who steals what he has
already been given, and what would belong to him if he knew
how to take what he has. Even up close he is always apart from
the rest, an agent of egotism who has crept into the center of an
ecstatic community. His gaze grates against the nobly open aura

152 / Bubbles

Giocto, Kiss of Judas , derail

of the God-man with a skulking, evilly stupid expression; even
in the closest bodily proximity to the masterful subject, Judas’
behavior is that of an actor who is stuck in his calculating greed
and has lost all distance from his role. If one wanted to use
Sartres terminology, one could say that Judas is the embodiment
of mauvaise foi , which follows the renunciation of the free dis¬
tance from the pantomime of one s own life. Even while face to
face with the teacher of freedom, the epitome of inspiring reci¬
procity and participatory animation, Judas displays a degraded

Between Fsoes / 153

selfishness that knows things only in the context of greedy
possession and people only as parts of manipulative transac¬
tions. The latent heading for the scene of the kiss of Judas is
unmistakably “The Sold God.” Giotto shows how the twelvefold
biune love sphere between Christ and His disciples is torn at this
point. It falls prey to a debasing interest that posits itself as the
higher one. In Giotto's painting, this spherological rip opens up
dramatically between the two faces confronting each other eye
to eye. Between the two protagonists profiles, a narrow cavity
opens up with a shape reminiscent of a chalice. Christ and Judas
exchange a glance from which no shared life can grow any
longer. From the perspective of the figure of Christ, it is a glance
through the burst biune sphere into the realm of the deanimated,
a mere two hands’ breadth before one’s own eyes. For the trai¬
tor Judas, the sphere-forming man is standing there like an
unattainable, impenetrable, alien thing. Now it is death that
marks the face of the God-man.

Giotto’s explorations in the interfacial space were not to be
without consequence; already among his immediate successors,
painters emerged who dared to portray the Madonna and the
baby Jesus looking at each other, even kissing, as if they wanted to
make the viewer a witness, albeit one who could only catch side¬
ways glimpses of the intimacies shared by the holiest persons. In
Madonna Enthroned with Child and Saints y displayed inside Massa
Marittima Cathedral, Ambrogio Lorenzetti placed precisely such
a mother-child tete-a-tete in the middle of a public realm com¬
prising angels and holy adorers. Between 1360 and 1370, a master
from Bologna painted a Madonna and child triptych, with pairs
of angel musicians on either side, in which the boy and his
mother sit cheek to cheek, looking into each other’s eyes. Here the

154/ Bubbles

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Madonna Enthroned with Child and Saints

culric image, which seeks to draw viewers into its sensual sphere
by addressing them head-on, changes into the painted novella of
a simultaneously holy and private eros. This is no longer the Baby
Jesus who has always been the savior, anticipating the passion
enthroned on his mothers lap; instead, He has almost entirely
become the natural child of a natural mother, without any side¬
ways glance at the believers who crowd around Him, demanding
acts of salvation and sucking at the aura of the suckling child.
As a childlike child, the infans Jesus, relieved for a second of
His representational duties, can immerse Himself in tender
embrace with His mother. There is no holy script here transporting
the infant into cosmic contexts; for a precarious moment, the
designated savior can enjoy a breather from salvation history.

Between Facias / 155

It is no coincidence that spiritualists of varying complexions
have taken offense at such Italianizations of the Gospel. The
Russian Orthodox priest and icon painter Pavel Florensky, a
defender of the Old Eastern European iconic concept, took a
belated swing at them when he posited the following thesis
in 1922:

From the Renaissance on, the religious art of the West has been
based upon aesthetic delusion. The Western religious artists
have loudly proclaimed the nearness and truth of the spiritual
reality they claim to represent in their art; but, lacking any
genuine relation to the spiritual reality, they think it completely
unnecessary to heed even those few scanty instructions about
icon painting (hence, about spiritual reality) that the Roman
Church gives them. 9

Like all thinkers taken over by Christianized Platonic furor,
Florensky misses the fact that the philosophical basis of
Renaissance painting was a radical shift in its truth model: in
a world-historical act of sensualizing and dramatizing its truth
relation, the European West exchanged primal images for pri¬
mal scenes. As a result of this fundamental semio-political
decision, European painters regained sights of the moving,
lively world for representation as scenes capable of expressing
truth, while the Platonizing East—including Islam 10 —con¬
tinued to base its image concept on the statuesque elevation
and immobilization of the ideas shining in. Part of the revolu¬
tionary truth-theoretical commitment of the burgeoning
Modern Age in Europe was the attempt to unite the principles
of research and revelation, while Eastern orthodoxy, faithfully

156 / Bubbles

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Madonna Enthroned with Child and Saints t detail

detween Faces /157

Clcvc, The Holy Family , after 1511, detail

Platonic* monarchist and hierarchist, insisted that the striving
for truth could only ever be interpreted as the homeward jour¬
ney from the image to the archetype. For the pictorial culture
and the politics of the European East, the shift to the individual
never took place in the way that had become second nature for
the Italians and their successors in the West. Even the art of
socialist realism in Soviet Russia remained stuck in Platonizing
protest against the Western liaison between the novella and the
primal scene: it glorified, in decidedly anti-Italian ways, the
eternal icons of the saints of production. Florensky’s polemic
against Western painting thus has its factual basis in the
image-typological opposition between the eidos and the
novella scene: someone who is looking for prototypes and
instead encounters proto-scenes can easily be tempted to speak
of aesthetic delusion or untruth, when he should actually be
speaking of an altered pictorial and visual truth model. Conse-
quendy, Florensky cannot do justice to the image-producing
elan of Western painting since the Renaissance, as he fails to
understand that it has been taken over by a post-Platonic,
scenic idea of truth. Along its own line, the history of the
Modern Age s great art became a torch relay of vitalization for
our views of the existent through the medium of elevated
scenes. Only subsequently, at the turn of the twentieth century,
did that second shift towards free pictoriality in the visual
arts become possible to which we refer, with a term that has
still scarcely been philosophically fulfilled, as the w art of
modernity.” It constituted no less than an overcoming of the
common European dogma of the object and the liberation of
perception from the age-old service of concreteness; at the
same time, it freed artists from the meanwhile unbearable

Between Faces /159

expectation to prove their brilliance while bound by the shackles
of nature imitation. n

Art historiography has only recently developed an adequately
complex notion of the long way European pictorial culture
had to travel before arriving at the representation of the indi¬
vidualized human face. 12 Overall, this path can be described as
an artistic process from the Christogram to the anthropogram. In
this retelling of the ascending path to the portrait face, the
Western European culture of religious devotion appears as a
hothouse of vision that, after waiting for centuries before the
imagines Christie has finally learned to meditate on the profane
human face in its indefensible uniqueness and to read it like a
worldly sacred text. This means that the germinal forms of all
later portrait optics should be sought in pictures of Christ whose
typological extremes are marked by the Catholic passion face and
the Orthodox transfiguration face. The typological threshold
values of Christography are the Western European crucifix and
the Eastern European true icon. In their respective regions, these
form the basis of an immeasurably rich pictorial practice whose
consequences have sedimented themselves to the very eyeground
of European viewers. These cultic image seeds were grown in a
virtual thousand-year hotbed before finally being planted out
into the open—that is, into the unabashedly profane world of
aristocratic and bourgeois self-descriptions. In the countless
portrait paintings of European individuals since the Renaissance,
then, one does not merely find the artistic co-founding of
“modern” individualism; the precise readings in the faces of
humans of all temperaments, all moods and almost all social
classes also show unmistakably that for the painters and societies

160 / Boobies

Joel-Peter Witkin, Venus Preferred to Christ

of the Modern Age, an epoch of newly animating transactions on
a liberated physiognomic market had dawned. Even in the
isolated portrait, which affords a single face an entire visual
space, the Neoplatonic pictorial order is now suspended; the
portraits of the Modern Age are not character icons testifying to
the participation of an individual face in an eternal facial eidos ,
but rather scenic variations on a dramatic facial presence. In the

3e:ween Feces /161

portrait as a genre, the great change of model likewise replaces
the icon with the primal scene, even if it appears that the indi¬
vidual face depicted in isolation has been removed from all
manifest contexts of actions and events. In fact, it was now per¬
mitted to set apart single faces in pictures of their own because,
under the new seeing conditions, they could still be recognized
as latendy dramatic presences even in quiet, apparendy static
visualization. Each individual image of a person realizes a facial
event that has leaped across from pictorial Christology to the
profane dimension. Behind every portrait of the Modern Age lies
the ecce homo face—the primal scene of human exposure with
which Jesus, standing next to Pilate, made his debut as the
bringer of the historically new perceptual imperative: recognize
the mortal God in the face of this man! 13 After the transition to
the Modern Age, the eye-opening power of this scene was bene¬
ficial for every profane individual who appeared in paintings as
an uomo singulare , and perhaps even everyone in the twentieth
century in their most informal private photos. In the Christian
school of eye training, any face painted using newer techniques
or reproduced by other means can potentially become a novella,
a notable visual incident, because every portrait presents a human
being to whom, in however diluted a form, the words “Behold
the Man” sail apply. Every portrait shows a lace whose purpose is to
challenge others to acknowledge its singularity. If every individual
soul is interesting for God, then its face—under the given con¬
ditions—is permitted to appeal to the attention of its kind. The
portrait as an artistic act is part of a protracting procedure—that
is, one that draws out aspects of the characteristic and individual—
which connects scenes back to primal scenes and embeds events in
primal events. Through this rooting of the special scenes and sights

162 /Bubbles

in primal scenes of eventful life, the modern space of visibilities
began to explode. A new seeing technique, a refined art of face
leading and a physiognomic semiotics now emancipated the facial
scenes from iconic repose. Thus, as a result of the novellistic
cultural revolution, even the face of the profane individual was
able to advance to the space of things that are elevated to the
dignity of representation; feces become visual dignitaries through
their ascent to the artistically recreatable and pre-creatable world.

This ascent merits a discussion of its own. By no means can
it be understood as an event that is only of concern for art history;
nor, however, could an expanded cultural and media history of
the image adequately describe the birth of the face from the
interfacial space, as this involves a process that points back to
long before all questions of representation. The elevation of the
profane face to portrait-worthy status is itself a very late and
precarious operation in the interfecial space, and cannot mani¬
fest itself as such in any one portrait. Portrait art, as a protracting
procedure that emphasizes or draws out individuality, is part of a
comprehensive face-producing movement that, beyond all art-
and image-historical manifestations, possesses genre-historical
status. The possibility offaciality 14 is connected to the process of
anthropogenesis itself. The drawing out of human faces from the
snouts of mammals: this points to a facial and interfecial drama
whose beginnings extend back into the early history of the
species. A glance at the fecial forms of those apes most closely
related to humans shows that they too, from afer, are on the way
to a quasi-human faciality, even though they have scarcely
covered half of the evolutionary distance between the mammals
head and the human face. We refer to this biologically and
culturally motivated setting apart of human faces from animal

Between Faces /163

Faces as protraction . It is not the portrait that enables the face to
be highlighted to the point of recognizability; rather, it is pro¬
traction that elevates faces to the threshold of portrayability in an
open-ended facio-genetic process. Protraction is the clearing 15 of
being in the face; it invites us to conceive of the history of being
as a somatic event. The opening up of the face—even more than
cerebralization and the creation of the hand—enabled people to
become animals open to the world, or, more significantly, to their
fellow humans. Its purpose, expressed in anthropological terms,
is an evolution of luxury within an insulating hothouse; its agent
and medium is above all, among other elements, the interfacial
space or sphere. Anyone seeking proof of the reality and effec¬
tiveness of intimate spheric processes can practically touch this
subtle realissimum here. It is sufficient to call to mind that human
faces have pulled themselves out of their animal form simply by
looking at one another, so to speak, in the course of a long-term
evolutionary drama. Naturally, sight and selection are positively
connected. That means: this turning of faces towards other faces
among humans became face-creating and face-opening, because
the welcome qualities of faces for the eyes of the potential sexual
partner inform generic processes via selection-effective prefer¬
ences. One could thus say that in a certain sense, human faces
produce one another; they blossom within an oscillatory circuit
of luxuriant reciprocal opening. Even the ancient faces from the
age of hordes were already sculptures of the attentiveness showed
by the sapiens specimens as they regarded one another. The evo-
lutionarily successful type Homo sapiens sapiens , who advanced to
Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean from the edges of the
African deserts sixty or seventy thousand years ago in the third
exodus wave (after Homo erectus one million years ago and the

164 / Bubbles

Albrcchr Diirer, Self-Portrait in a Fur Coat , oil on wood panel, 1500, Aire
Pinakothek, Munich

Beivveeri races /165

Prom Frog to Poet, from the collection of Johann Caspar
Lavater. The original includes further drawings

166 / BuDb os

Neanderthal two hundred thousand years ago), embodied a
slightly more graceful branch of the Homo species; this type,
named Cro-Magnon man after one of the main places of archae¬
ological discovery in Southwest France, developed into Homo
sapiens aestheticus, with whom elegance was connected to selection
advantages. The more recent facial genesis—with its fair and foul
monsters—has taken place in an interfacial hothouse where
human faces grow like physiognomic orchids. This facialization,
admittedly, is a species-wide, acute noetic-facial drama. Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who, along with Thomas Macho,
presented the most original theory of facial development, fall
prey to their own de-generalizing elan when, in their reflections
on the creation of the face among Europeans, they claim:

“Primitives” may have the most human of heads, the most
beautiful and most spiritual [sic!], but they have no face and
need none. The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It
is not even that of the white man; it is White man himself,
with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The
face is Christ. The face is the typical European [...]. Thus the
face is by nature an entirely specific idea [...]. 16

It is clear enough that these emphatic statements are only possible
because the authors have failed to make a necessary and funda¬
mental distinction, namely between the protraction of the
Homo sapiens face as such and the characterological "writing” on
the facial slate. As a result, they were prone to confusing the
species-wide, open sapiens face with the culture-specifically
molded physiognomic or semantic face. In their fruitful
methodic aversion to the deceptively universal, the case-specific

between Paces /' 167

thinkers Deleuze and Guattari make themselves unnecessarily
blind to the overarching case of faciality, the long-term facio-
genetic drama, which encompasses the entire human race
without exceptions, and always takes place in two acts via the
primary stage of facial opening and the secondary stage of cul¬
tural and character inscription. 17 The primal interfacial process
is a genetic-aesthetic movement characteristic of all sapientes
whose course can be made clear through a simple comparison
of human childrens faces and those of young chimpanzees; this
process extends back at least a million years, and its result is the
Cro-Magnon type in the bio-aesthetic and racial branches that
are scattered worldwide. The facial genesis sums up a universal
history of luxuriant participations of humans in the facial creation
of their fellows. Whoever wishes to know what defines the con¬
tent of this history need only seek the basis of the difference
between an ape’s face and a humans. Once these poles of pro¬
traction have been marked and the course of the facio-genetic
movement thus mapped out, one can ask as to the motives or
motors that drive or pull along the process leading to the
human face.

One can grasp the efficient motor or protractor of human
facial genesis by becoming sure of the hothouse character of all
prehistoric and historical hominid life forms, in which the inter¬
facial warmth field forms a decisive cell. To gain an idea of the
affective temperatures in the horde hothouses of early history, it
is sufficient to recall how, throughout our species, many adult
women—as well as those men capable of paternal feelings—are
still delighted by the beautiful faces of babies and infants. What
requires explanation about this spontaneous inclination to adopt
a charmed and friendly posture towards children s faces is not its

168 / Bubbles

universality, but rather its occasional absence among individuals
who, through specializations of affectivity or emotional barriers,
are excluded from the tender microclimate that normally ensues
spontaneously between adult and infant faces. The species-wide
interfacial greenhouse effect—which manifests itself above all in the
joy at the visible joy of the encountered face—is itself embedded in
the emotional density of the primary sociospheres. In these,
horde and family members are affectively transparent for one
another to a high degree; their participative patterns are syn¬
chronized in bipolar and multipolar fashion a priori . In the
innermost ring of those bell jars of social participation which
emotionally rhythmicize and air-condition group life, one almost
universally finds an especially protected and charged field with a
highly refined character akin to the nest and the incubator: the
mother-child space. One could, with very good reason, attempt
to describe the entire process of anthropogenesis in terms of this
primary rooming-in. What we refer to with the unfortunate
modernist term "society” is, from an evolutionary perspective,
essentially a shell system composed of more dispensable per¬
sons—later known as fathers—whose function is to protect the
indispensable and fragile core sphere of the mother-child field. It
is in these mother-child symbioses that the interfacial incubator
has its warmest, most open, and normally also its most jovial
points; and it is with the facial interaction of mothers and chil¬
dren in the transitional field between animal and human that the
true facioplastic operation on humans begins. It does not simply
inscribe some aesthetic moods into the facial features of indi¬
viduals as modern plastic surgeons do for their customers, who
reject their own natural faces; it is what gives human faces their
open, slate-like character in the first place, and this character is

Between Faces /169

the adhesive that sticks the gold leaf of facial beauty and par¬
ticularity to a person. There must have been high evolutionary
prizes attached over long periods to the production of facial
profiles that were more delicate, more open, more delightful and
more capable of joy. In this case, Darwins theorem must be
modified into a law of the survival of the more attractive.
Increasing the attractiveness of humans for humans, however, is
the opposite of environmental adaptation in the sense of improving
fitness: it shows the early tendency of evolution towards free
flower formation in the erotic-aesthetic hothouse of humanization.
How else could the primitives mentioned by Deleuze and
Guattari have attained such human, beautiful and spiritualized
“heads”? The major groups of the sapiens family are probably
separated by divergent ethno-aesthetics; hence there is no guarantee
that all of them would appeal sensually to all others. But all those
specific and singular aspects noted in the face as character traits,
or as letters and lines of regional temperaments and acquired
qualities, can only enter the facial slate once this latter has been
opened up, through protraction, as a clearing for physiognomic
entries and fortuitous properties. The most accurate illustration
of this protractions modus operandi is the reciprocal, delicately
enlivened radiance of the mothers and the child’s faces in the
period of postnatal bonding. Its back-and-forth motion is rooted
in old tribal-historical synchronizations between the protagonists
in primal-scenic games of affection; it belongs to an ensemble of
inborn schemata for careful bipersonal participation. 18

More than 95 precent of Homo sapiens long way to his present
faciality probably lies in prehistoric times. Throughout this
entire period, the face of the respective other cannot yet—
aside from vague hints of familiarity and relatedness—have

17G / Bubbles

functioned as an identifying mark or living signal element, as it
did in the time of later peoples and kingdoms. The question of
the face as proof of identity would not have become significant
until the formations of peoples in the early classical period, the
time in which human groups were exceeding their critical size
for the first time and having to develop new means of cognitive
orientation in an environment of mostly unrelated, unknown
people. From this point on, the eyes of humans within peoples
became attuned to reading faces with a view to tracing family
resemblances and individual character traits. The eyes of earlier
humans would have lacked this combination of facial curiosity
and identificatory interest entirely; their concern for the faces of
the others must largely have been of a bio-aesthetic nature.
Before the time of Neolithic villages and the first towns, close
faces were more a comfort than a signal connected to identifica¬
tion. This is why cultural historians and philosophers, especially
Leroi-Gourhan and Thomas Macho, have rightly pointed out
that depictions of human faces are completely absent from the
pictorial world of the Stone Age—as if, for early humans, not
only their own faces were invisible, but also those of their fellow
men and women.

The absence of faces from the oldest pictures only proves
one thing unequivocally, however: the concern for the faces of
the others belongs in an area that neither permits nor demands
representation. The early interfacial perceptions are not interested
in meanings and character traits, but in qualities of familiarity
and cheer; they are geared towards facial light. Mothers and
children do not paint each another; they beam at each other.
Evolution and its heightened form in anthropological self¬
breeding have evidently rewarded facial formations that portray

Gaiwe-en l-<&&& /171

the ability to express joy. Just as the genitals are the organic
creations of an inter-genital pleasure principle, human faces are
the expressive forms of an interfacial joy principle. Facial magic
has a clear formula: the original separation of joy. This is what
made the accommodation of faces by other faces a fundamental
possibility in the human field. The reference in Phaedrus to the
“godlike face” contains the first attempt in philosophical
thought to approach protractive facial resonance as a point of
contact with happiness. Platonic semantics cannot quite do
justice to this facial brightening, however, because it only inter¬
prets facial beauty in the individual as the shining through of a
light from the transcendent world. A Spinozist semantics, on the
other hand, would have the advantage of understanding facial
opening as the expression of a force that does not—like the
idea—still remain transcendent while shining into the realm of
images, but completely fulfills and exhausts itself in expres¬
sion. 19 The opening of the face thus extends as far as there is joy
that communicates itself to the others face. (By analogy, there is
only as much real sexuality as there is actual genital perfor¬
mance.) These resonance relationships belong to entirely
pre-personal and field-like circumstances, as this joy can neither
be appropriated by individuals nor occupied by meaningful
representations. For as soon as representation reaches for the
faces, it generally no longer portrays the face of the joy principle,
but rather the faces of the representative power and their expres¬
sions of meaningfulness. Only the countenance of Buddha and
the smiling angels of Gothic art have succeeded in evading this
subordination to meaningfulness; their pictorial appearance
displays the facial clearing itself. Who could overlook the fact
that part of the Mona Lisas appeal comes from being allowed

172 / Buboles

;.;,7 ■ Y

■!*: , -ia 1

L. J. M. Morel ci’Arleux, Dissertation sur un tmite de Charles le Brun , concernant les
rapports de hi physionomie humaine avec celle des animaux , Paris, 1806

to show a face which has eluded, in the most mysterious and
subversive manner, the compulsion to express meaning rather
than joy?

When Deleuze and Guartari write in good epigrammatic
cheer that “The face is Christ. The face is the typical European,”
they touch—starting from the exceptional case of the prototypical

tic'ween r aces / 173

European face—on a fundamental aspect of the history-creating
process in the age of empires and advanced religions. In fact,
wherever advanced civilizations have established themselves—
that is, by no means only in Europe—protraction reaches a stage
in which meaningfully standardizing central icons of historicity
push the older bio-aesthetic opening of the face further. It has
been shown from different angles how European cultural faces
are, even well into post-Christian times, in a sense all heirs to the
Christograms; Deleuze and Guattari are not alone in their case-
historical equation of Christ s face and the European face (minus
the exaggeration). Taking their cues most obviously from Johann
Caspar Lavater s Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der
Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe [Physiognomic Fragments
to Further the Knowledge and Love of Human Beings], pub¬
lished in four installments between 1775 and 1778, recent
theologians, especially Protestant ones, have postulated a wealth
of cunning analogies or echoes between Gods incarnation and
the transition of once tribal, unbaptized European feces to a
Christ-like shape. 20 Recent theological physiognomy points out
that precisely the feces of post-Christian times owe their specific
visibility to protraction through the central Christian icons. Even
Lavaters physiognomy, however, does not function only as an
introduction to seeing God in everyone; it also provides a Chris¬
tian recognition service that aims to read virtue and vice in the
faces of inscrutable neighbors and strangers with occult pasts. All
physiognomies of the Modem Age show an implicit policing
aspect and a strategic approach to a knowledge of human nature;
this already applies to the notorious animal-human analogies of
Giovanni Battista della Porta from 1586, which, for all their
unmistakable infamy, must be credited with exposing the problem

174 / Bubbles

From the collection of Johann Caspar Lava ter: “1. prudent and reftnedly good,
2: prudent and crude, 3: noticeably weak, 4: the bridge somewhat more astute
than the button and nostril, 5: complete without the side of the nose, 6: weakly
good, 7: aside from the upper part, prudent, 8: somewhat unnatural at the bottom,
but nor entirely stupid, 9: weakly stupid”

between Faces / 1 75

of protraction as such in a garishly embarrassing and comical
fashion. This is hardly less true of Lavaters moralistic descriptions
of the virtuous and depraved temperaments, and what he alleges
are their reliably identifiable facial features. Undoubtedly, Lavater
was speaking above all to the noble, world-fearing soul of the early
bourgeois period, which sought guidance amid the confused
theater of relationships that had developed in the burgeoning
market society Referring to requests for a physiognomic key that
promised to decipher the faces of strangers as characterological
texts, Lavaters Christian-philanthrophic science of the face
eagerly made itself useful to a wider audience:

If one imagines being inside the spheres of a statesman, pastor,
preacher, steward, doctor, merchant, friend, house father or
spouse, one will quickly see what manifold, important use
each one of these can make of physiognomic knowledge in
their respective sphere. 21

Naturally Lavaters notion of the sphere has nothing to do with
the facio-genetic dynamics of intimate joy sharing; it simply
points to the experience that bourgeois professional forms of
existence create their own circles of interaction with respectively
typical experiential radii. The reference to spheres here hints, as
is generally the case in the language of Goethes time, at the
increasingly accented pluralism of life forms and segments of
reality in modernizing society

As far as the East Asian world in the time of advanced civi¬
lizations is concerned, one can scarcely overestimate the
central-iconic formative power of Buddha depictions. Just as, in

176 / Bubbles

Buddhist Protraction I: statue of the Buddhist ruler Jayavarman VII, Kompong
Svay (?)> turn of 13th century. National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh

Between Feces / 177

the Christian cultural area, crucifixes and transfigurative icons
imprinted themselves on the faces and visions of Europeans
through drawn-out modeling processes, the Indian, Indochinese,
Chinese and Japanese world received a far-reaching focioplastic
and protractive stimulus from the images of the Awakened One.
In a physiognomic modeling process at least sixty generations
long, the figure of Buddha, depicted in contemplation, cast its
spell on the faces of monks and meditators of all social classes; his
Nirvanic icon impressed upon on an entire cultural area the
message of the dignity of sitting in meditation with eyes closed.
It constitutes the most sublime shape of the ontological paradox
of world-open worldlessness. 22 For over two thousand years, the
image of the meditating Buddha has also presented the secular
classes in Asian societies with a central icon of detachedness. It
furthered the protraction of faces bearing an inclination towards
the volition of non-volition. Although it is consistently portrayed
as a still face, it holds an intimate promise of resonance for all
who view it because, in its lively, animated calm, it shows the face
of shared pain and shared joy. Its concentration conveys a
heightened form of joy, as it exudes a concern for fellow beings
beyond all mimic conventions and reflexes. It smiles beyond the
gesture of smiling; in this, it presents the antithesis of the current
American facial convention, which, as Europeans can meanwhile
see—via film images—with the naked eye, has led to the pro¬
traction of a “fitness emptiness/' Unlike the face of Christ, which
aims either for final suffering or the representation of transcen¬
dence, Buddhas face shows the pure potential of an absolutely
immanent touchability by whatever comes before it. By floating
in a state of readiness to resonate, this face is itself the realization
of the Gospel: it announces nothing, rather showing what is

178 /Bubbles

already there. As an expressive manifestation of euphoric empti¬
ness, the countenance of the Awakened One in contemplation is
the opposite of the character heads of Western Caesars, modeled
by violence and marked by determination.

It is not only the faces of spiritually “significant people” that
have affected facial protraction in the millennia of turbulent his¬
tory. Alongside the divine images and depictions of god-manlike
mediators and teachers, likenesses of rulers have, since classical-
imperial times, also played a part in the opening up of faces into
the expansive. If the idea of a kingdom of God became visible in
a human face, and if the concept of Nirvana had created its
shaped visual manifestation in the countenance of Buddha, then
the rulers’ likenesses of the ancient world lent a physiognomic
profile to the power of empire. In European antiquity, it was
above all the images of Alexander and Augustus that—occa¬
sionally taking cues from the anthropomorphic Greek statues of
gods—brought out a faciality in the principle of the world
power. One could speak of a Caesaromorphism among the
depicted faces in ancient worlds of power; for the spheric expan¬
sion of the archaic intimate space into the imperial universe
inevitably inscribes itself in the faciality of the eminent repre¬
sentatives of power. Hence the faces of rulers can be presented
like programs.

In the year 38 BC, in the middle of his power struggle with
Mark Anthony, Octavian, the future Caesar Augustus, minted a
coin on which the intimate face-a-face of two men was let out as
the open secret of current imperial politics. On the Octavian
denarius, left of the center, one can see in profile the wreathed
head of Caesar, designated the divine Julius; facing him on the
right is the head of his great-nephew and adoptive son C.

180 / Buobes

Coin of Octavian, 38 BC

Octavius, who was already unwavering in his wish to be
addressed as Caesar Divi Filius : the son of God. It is easy to
understand what this assignment of positions means in a culture
that reads and writes from left to right: an intra-familial transfer¬
al of power from an older to a younger god. Octavians coin and
name politics was part of his strategy during the civil war—
which was also waged using all available theological means—in
which he forced his rival Mark Anthony to his knees after a

Between Facss /181

thirteen-year struggle for sole dictatorship. The coin with the
double portrait testifies to the core dogma of Augustan political
theology: Octavian stands facing his father as “son by the grace
of God.” 23 The father places the imperial mission on his son
through adoption; the son, for his part, chooses his own father as
his idiosyncratic god* The Julian family theology effortlessly leads
into the Augustian imperial theology. The most powerful reli¬
gious-political fiction of the Old World is proclaimed on this
little denarius: the doctrine of Gods monarchy through Caesars
successors. The small coin contains the first Western gospel, the
good news after Augustus. Two men look into each others faces
at very close range; the imperial mandate flows from the father to
the son. The son cannot be a son without the empire that
devolves upon him; and the father is not a father without the
deification which the son returns to him. The future of the
empire as a whole has contracted into an interfacial scene. From
the start, contemporaries had noticed the young Octavians
resemblance to his father like a significant sign, and Octavian
never had reservations about capitalizing on this similarity; at
every point in his career, he seemed to be aware that, like his
adoptive father, he bore the empire in his face as a power of com¬
mand and a form of world. Octavians battles at sea and on land
were military prayers to the Caesar father: thy kingdom come.
Like Pauline Christianity, the Caesarian empire is also a product
of the romantic power to posit the father through the son—and
the god through the apostle. In this, Augustus and Paul belong
together as theologians and rival strategists; their methodic
parallelism is the occidental secret. 24 In fact, the Octavian denarius
was already the first model for a successful doctrine of the Trinity.
For just as the power of the father is transferred to the son, the

182 / Bubbles

sons fury of succession places the father on the throne of thrones
as the source of empire. The unity invoked by Jesus in the phrase
“my Father and I” scarcely differs from that between the first
Caesar and his successor. The third element that unifies the two
father and their respective sons is the space-forming potency of
their deep devotion to one other; the spirit circulating between
them is that of empires. What the empire or the church are
supposed to become was originally a face-a-face. Certainly the
Jesuan kingdom initially consisted entirely in an intimacy with
the Father that was emphatically not of this world; its third
element is a love that claims to be higher than all striving for
trivial success. The Roman father and his son, on the other hand,
are unified by the holy spirit of imperial success. The first world
market forms where this spirit rules: a monetary empire with
omnipresent imperial money. Money is the third person in the
Roman trinity—that is why anyone who sees the son of Augus¬
tus on the coin simultaneously sees the father. Father and son are
united by the spirit of what is valid\ the circular form of the coin
draws the joined two together into the ideal form. As long as this
coin was in circulation, one could indeed obtain everything with
it; it is the pragmatic communion wafer of Roma aetema . Once
Octavian had defeated Mark Anthony, Romans could act officially
in the name of Caesar, Augustus and the Holy Empire.

In advanced civilizations, one inevitably gains the impression
that the entire history of their central facial icons is one of male
faces. Christomorphy, Buddhomorphy and Caesaromorphy are
the three most prominent manifestations of this male domi¬
nance in ancient and medieval faciality. The mere reference to
the Marian images of medieval Europe, however, is sufficient to

Betwesr Faces /163

disprove the male monopoly in the field of represented faces.
Marian iconography in Catholicism, for its part, simply meant
the continuation of an immeasurably broad tradition of mother-
religious cultic images by Christian means. Where the universe
of the great mothers presents itself in pictures, the paradoxical
nature of the older protraction at once becomes evident: the
focus of humanization, the female, motherly face itself, remains
invisible the longest. Although it is the source of the invitation
to hominization as well as humanization, the old religions and
their cultic images look past the womans face—and indeed the
human face in general. They protract and elevate the non-facial
parts of female human beings: the buttocks, breasts and vulva,
the attributes of female sexual power. The fact that beyond these
biological details, the path of spiritualization, intimization and
enlivenment has long since been trodden in the faces of women,
especially mothers, is not evident in the oldest pictorial culture;
a picture is not always worth a thousand words. The protraction
itself does not appear in any portrait, the face-opening power of
maternal faces remains undepicted. No trace of facial matriarchy,
or indeed of the silent evolutionary work of the facializing
process in general, finds its way into the oldest products of
human visual power. Overall, people would have to wait until
the age of the major religions and first philosophies for the
absence of individualized faces in visual works to end: only then
had humans reached the point from which seeing would be seen
and thinking would be thought; and now they also found them¬
selves faced with faces. Like early theory, which specifically
emphasized thought and specifically examined the act of
viewing, the discovery of the face through its depiction belongs
to the reflexive dawning of the worldviews of ancient cultures.

Between Faces i 186

Ice Age deity with wing-ltke shoulders, Dolni Veston-
ice, c. 27000-26000 BC

186/ Bubbles

Precisely this discovery however, entirely ignores the maternal
faces. Where the human face is protracted and established by
representational means, it is always—in keeping with the way of
the world—more likely to be the cultic image of male rulers,
masters or gods. The female face, the evoking, invigorating, wel¬
coming, rests like an archetypal preconscious on the foundation
of all processes that depict history. By its nature, the earliest face
of Our Dear Lady is more concealed than that of God, whom
the Jewish ban on images aimed to prevent from being degraded
through representations (because he was to be imagined as
living, and so far there had only been portrait monuments of
the dead). The first beloved face, the initial face, which was the
first—and, as often, the only—good news, did not need to be
sealed with a ban on depiction. Like a painted-over archetype, it
has survived since time immemorial under the protection of
non-recognition; more invisible than what is veiled, and more
inaccessible than what is taboo. While it was once an aspect of
theological maturity to prohibit man-made images of the One
God, it will be an act of increasing anthropological reflection to
understand why that animating first face naturally withdraws
from all images.

The interfacial space—the sensitive sphere of bipolar facial
proximity—also has its own peculiar history of catastrophe. It
begins long before that estrangement through betrayal of which
Giottos kiss of Judas told us. Interfaciality is not simply the zone
of a socio-natural history of friendliness; from very early times,
the history of encountering strangers was also an eye training
center of terror. Hence the solidarity between significant aspects
of the archaic and modern periods. The oldest cultures did not

Between Faces /187

yet have the media to appropriate what was radically foreign, and
modern ones no longer have any. Hence both depend on the
mask as the means to encounter the inhuman or extra-human
with a corresponding non-face or substitute face. In both archaic
and modern times, depiction turns what was once a face into a
shield to ward off what disfigures and negates faces. The mask is
the facial shield that is raised in the war of sights.

Where modern art does still depict faces, it keeps a figura¬
tive record of a constant interfacial catastrophe. In analogy to
archaic facial decoration, it shows faces that are no longer mod¬
eled within correspondences between intimate spheres,
unacknowledged faces drawn by the world powers of emptying
and disfigurement—including, not least, deformation through
success, the permanent grinning of the victors, faces that no
longer look upon human partners but rather monitors, cameras,
markets and evaluation committees. The classical modern
portrait, however, can no longer do justice to faces formed
through interaction with monstrous and mechanical sights. It is
therefore understandable to conclude that in much art of
modernity, protraction itself has come to a halt—or started to
emphasize the inhuman and extra-human aspects of the human
face. Detraction and abstraction have won out over protraction
as facioplastic morphological forces. Face-distorting and face¬
emptying powers have changed the portrait into the ditrait and
the abstraity with a corresponding twofold tendency in facial
art: firstly, the impulse to express states beyond expression, and
secondly, the rebuilding of the face into a post-human pros¬
thesis. It is no coincidence that the most distinctive new place
in the innovated medial world is the interface, which no longer
refers to the space of encounter between faces, but rather the

Between Faces /189

contact point between the face and the non-face, or between
two non-faces.

While Francis Bacons screaming pope still shows a face in
explosion, Andy Warhols self-portraits attain the state of selfless¬
ness through self-sale. Both works still have a place on the edge
of expressive art; for not only the laceration, but also the freezing
of the face are subject to the principle of expression. Newer
approaches to a facial aesthetic in visual art have clearly separated
off from this. Cindy Shermans montage Untitled #314c dissolves
the face into a creased landscape of evil, self-willed pieces of
tissue, with a mouth whose labia display an obscene opening up.
Here there is nothing left of what Benjamin called the sex appeal
of the anorganic; the flesh has become a synthetic copy of itself.
There are surely few works in contemporary art that testify with
such violence to the changing of the portrait into the ditrait ;
Ironically undermined features tending towards the detrait are
also disclosed in the series of quasi-self-portraits by the Cologne
painter Irene Andessner, who eludes the viewers facial expecta¬
tions by showing neither a face nor a mask. What she presents
forms a sequence of pre-faces or preliminary stages of feces with
a stern character—raw materials of the face, ingredients of
beauty awaiting re-elevation, as it were, to the rank of the full
female visage. We see an investigative energy staring through
frozen eyes, permeating this female face like a changeable
medium. The face in seven variations is illuminated by an
unchanging, calm cruelty; coming from a distant place, it cannot
quite become the faces own. It maintains the balance between a
terrible, almost disfiguring truth and a will to survive that almost
manages to produce a beautiful mask. Suspended between
portait , abstrait and detrait , Irene Andessners series of faces

190 / Bubbles

Board mask of rhe Mbole, Lower Uelc, Democratic Republic of Congo, wood

Between Faces /191

illustrates a postmodern alternative to modern facial disfigure¬
ment; painted with a humor without laughter and a despair
without tears, it expresses the still-human face’s waiting for its
withdrawn, adequate other. This is a waiting that simultaneously
postulates and doubts anthropomorphism; at the same time,
almost involuntarily, the series betrays an incredulous hesitation
about requesting the gratifying attention of the other. Just as
one could view postmodern ornamentation as a pastime while
waiting for unattainable beauty, Irene Andessner s painted prepa¬
ration for beauty could be read as a sign of waiting for the
moment of the true face.

Looking at the entire early history of human faciality, one can say
that humans have faces not for themselves, but for the others.
The Greek word for the human face, prosopon , expresses this fact
most clearly: it refers to the sight one presents to the others
gaze. 25 Initially, a face is only accessible to the view of the other;
as a human face, however, it also has the ability to respond to
being seen with a gaze of its own—and this gaze, naturally, does
not initially see itself, but only the face opposite. So the face
certainly contains the reciprocal intertwining of gaze and
counter-gaze, but nothing suggesting a self-reflexive turn.
Leaving aside the precarious reflections in the smooth water that
have always been possible, the self-encounter of human faces in
mirror images is a very late addition to primary interfacial reality.
For the people of the twentieth century, however, living in apart¬
ments covered in mirrors, it would be asking the unimaginable if
one expected them to realize the meaning of a central fact: that
until recently, the quasi-totality of the human race consisted of
individuals who never, or only in highly exceptional situations.

1927 Bubbles

Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X> oil on canvas, 1953

Be-ween Faces /193

Andy Warhol, Six Self-Portraits, silkscreen print, 1966

194 / BjObles*

Cindy Sherman, Untitled#3l4c

Between Faces /195

Irene C. Andessner, Edition von l bis 7. Sieben Sdbstportraits , oil on canvas, 1992

1 M!

| . «

1. j}/

" Int Jr 1 I

n^HP;

1 96 / Bubbles

saw their own faces. The first mirrors are typically equipment
from the start of the Axial Age; until the Modern Age, they
remained objects in the possession of a privileged few and
cloaked in secrecy. They also soon belonged to the physical and
metaphorical assets of those who invoked the rare commodity of
self-knowledge. The renowned bronze elf mirror found in
Hochheim has been dated to the fourth century BC; if geography
had not proved otherwise, one could call it a pre-Socratic instru¬
ment. Glass mirrors of the type common today have only existed
since c. 1500—and initially only in Venice. Supplying large parts
of populations with mirrors only really began in the nineteenth
century, and the process would not have been complete in the
First World until the middle of the twentieth. Only in a mirror-
saturated culture could people have believed that for each
individual, looking into one’s own mirror image realized a primal
form of self-relation. And only in a population defined—across
all classes—as mirror-owners could Freud and his successors have
popularized their pseudo-proofs for so-called Narcissism and the
supposedly visually transmitted primary auto-eroticism of
humans. Even Lacans tragically presumptuous theorem about
the mirror stage’s formative significance for the ego function
cannot overcome its dependence on the cosmetic or ego-technical
household inventory of the nineteenth century—much to the
detriment of those who were taken in by this psychological
mirage. 26 We should precisely not read the myth of Narcissus as
evidence of a natural relationship between humans and their own
faces in the mirror, but as an indication of the disturbingly unac¬
customed nature of burgeoning facial reflection. It is not by
chance that Ovids version of the tale—assuming it even has a
pre-Ovidian source—dates from the time in which it was possible

Betweer Faces /197

Oskar Schlemmer, Abstraktcr Kopfi 1923

198 / Subclss

for the eye and the face—or, in more modem terms, the subject
face and the object face—to be connected in a new, fateful way. If
Narcissus wanted to embrace the face in the watery mirror, it was
definitely also because it had not yet become his own; his stupid
fall into the image presupposed that until then, every visible face
had to be that of another. The Narcissan mishap constitutes an
accident in the early stages of self-reflection. Before the ancient
dawn of reflection, it was unimaginable that a visible face, par¬
ticularly an enchanting one, could be one’s own. Alcibiades seems
to be the first historically identifiable figure in the European
tradition whose characteristics point to an aesthetic awareness of
his own face: Socrates refers to this by deliberately avoiding the
subject of his pupil’s vanity, talking his way around Alcibiades’
beautiful face in order to address his soul direcdy. As far as the
female side of facial dawning is concerned, Euripides lets
Clytemnestra look smugly in the mirror after Agamemnon’s
departure and adorn her plaited hair with jewels, as if to antici¬
pate her adultery and later crime. Among the Greeks, in any case,
mirrors were reserved exclusively for women. Normally, a Greek
man could only find out about his appearance from the way
others regarded him. And it was only Socrates who made the
amusing suggestion that the beautiful youths who surrounded
him should look at themselves in the mirror as often as possible,
to spur on their ambition to prove worthy of their physical
merits also in the domain of the soul. The visually concretized
notion of an “own face” formed, as these intimations illustrate, in
the course of a drawn-out, individualizing evolutionary process—
via stages that can be distinguished with varying clarity as
ancient-medieval, modern and postmodern contributions to
facial subjectivism.

Between Feces /199

The initial experience of faciality rests on the basic circumstance
that humans who regard humans are themselves regarded by
humans, and return to themselves by way of the sight of the
other. In this sense the face, as vision, is the face, as visage, of the
other. At first, then, a face is always something that can only be
viewed over there and up there. 27 In the initial bipolar interfa¬
cial game, the gazes are distributed among the partners in such
a way that each, for the time being, learns enough about himself
by looking into the face of the other who is looking at him. The
other thus acts as a personal mirror; but he is also the opposite
of a mirror, for he permits neither the peace nor the discretion
of a reflection in glass or metal—but above all because he pro¬
duces not an eidetic reproduction, but rather an affective echo.
One can only speak of a glance into ones M own” mirror face
when the Individual has turned away from the other and
towards its face, which now appears and must be appropriated,
in the reflecting image.

A face in the mirror that can be accepted as ones own,
without any catastrophe of misattribution, only appears when
individuals can habitually withdraw from the interfacial field of
alternating glances—which, from the Greek perspective, is by
definition also a field of alternating speech—into a state in
which they no longer require completion through the present
other, but can complete themselves through themselves, so to
speak. Facial ego identity, as the possibility of having a face of
ones own, thus depends on that rebuilding of the subjective
space which began with the Stoics’ invention of the self-sufficient
individual. Only in European and Asian antiquity did it become
possible for people to establish a form of intimate eccentricity in
relation to themselves that allowed them to be themselves in one

200 / Bubbles

Titian, Venus in tfw Mirror

Between Facas / 201

Kiki Kogelnik, Scissor Head, glazed ceramic, 1977

202 / Bubbes

place, and at once their own observer in another. In nascent
individualism the individuals, as living observers—as inner
witnesses of their own lives, one could say—adopt the perspec¬
tive of an outside view on themselves, and thus augment their
interfacial spheric opening with a second pair of eyes that,
strangely enough, is not even their own.

Thus begins the history of the human who wants, and is
meant to have, the ability to be alone . The separate actors in
the individualistic regime become isolated subjects under the
dominion of the mirror, that is to say of the reflecting, self-
completing function. They increasingly organize their lives
under the appearance that they could now play both parts in
the game of the bipolar relationship sphere alone, without a
real other; this appearance becomes stronger throughout the
European history of media and mentalities, culminating at the
point where the individuals decide once and for all that they
themselves are the substantial first part, and their relationships
with others the accidental second part, A mirror in each room
belonging to each individual is practical life’s patent on this
state. Admittedly, the game of the individuals self-completion
before the mirror (and other ego-technical media, especially
the book, whether being written or read) would lose its attraction
if it were not usable for the sublime fiction of indepen¬
dence—that dream of self-rule which has influenced the
model of the wise life since the beginnings of classical philos¬
ophy. Because he knows himself, the wise man who can be his
own master must no longer tolerate being penetrated by the
gaze of a ruler, or indeed having any other fix him with their
gaze. He would possess a quality that Hegel triumphantly
called impenetrable .

Betweer Faces i 203

Arnold Schonberg, Trdnen , oil on canvas

204 1 Bibles

It is thus not far from “know thyself” to “complete thyself”
Both of these, self-knowledge as well as self-completion, are
operations in a sphere of illusory bipolarity that, like an ellipse,
only formally possesses two focal points. In truth, the face
before the mirror has entered into a pseudo-interfacial relation
to another that is not an other. It can relish the illusion of being
in a closed field of vision, as it has expelled the other and the
others from its inner space and replaced them with technical
means of self-completion—the media in their modern func¬
tion. Thus the world is divided into an inside and an outside
that differ in the same way as the ego and the non-ego. Only
where such expulsions have become the rule, and the conscious
harboring and letting through of the other the exception, can a
structurally modern society ensue, populated by individuals of
which the majority live in the dominant real fiction: the phan¬
tasm of an intimate sphere with a single inhabitant, namely
that particular individual. This real illusion underpins all indi¬
vidualistic circumstances; it secures the solitary confinement of
every individual within an interconnected bubble. “You are
self-contagious, do not forget. Do not let your you gain the
upper hand” (Henri Michaux).

between Faces / 205

CHAPTER 3

Humans in the Magic Circle

On the Intellectual History of the
Fascination with Closeness

In her magic circle bound,

I must live as she deems sound.

The change, alas! How great it is!

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “New Life, New Love”

Anyone seeking alternatives to an existence in stoical self-
sufficiency or individual self-arrest in front of the mirror would
do well to recall an epoch in which all reflection on the condition
humana was pervaded by the evidence that between humans,
whether in familiar proximity or on the open market, a restless
play of affective infections was in progress. Long before the
axioms of individualistic abstraction established themselves,
the psychologist-philosophers of the early Modern Age had
made it clear that the interpersonal space was overcrowded
with symbiotic, erotic and mimetic-competitive energies that
fundamentally deny the illusion of subject autonomy. The
central law of intersubjectivity as experienced in premodern
attitudes is the enchantment of humans through humans. If one
wanted to adopt the traditional view, one could go so far as to

207

say that humans are always obsessed by their own kind—leaving
aside their extra-human occupiers for now. Among humans*
fascination is the rule and disenchantment the exception. As
desiring and imitating beings, humans constantly experience
that they not only hold a lonely potential for desiring the other
within themselves, but also that they manage, in an opaque and
non-trivial manner, to infect the objects of their desire with
their own longing for them; at the same time, individuals
imitate the others longing for a third element as if under some
infectious compulsion. In the language of tradition this figures
as the law of sympathy, which states that love cannot but awaken
love. Hatred likewise generates its congenial response, and rivalry
infects those after the same object with the vibrant greed of the
competitor. Where philosophy of the early Modern Age men¬
tions such effects of resonance and infection, it spontaneously
draws on the vocabulary of magological traditions. As early as
antiquity, it was reflection on affective causalities of the magical
type that initiated the clarification of the interpersonal or inter-
demonic concert which, from Plato’s time on, was interpreted as
a work of eros. Continuing along Plato’s path, philosophers of
the late fifteenth century launched a new erotologicai discourse
whose echo extends into the depth-psychological activities of
the early nineteenth century and the pop-psychoanalytical half¬
thoughts of the present.

When Socrates and Plato began to shine the light of discussion
onto the dynamics of the human attraction to humans, they
made it clear that the subjects desire for the beautiful other
cannot only be its private and particular feeling, but must
simultaneously be understood as a function of a public force

208 / Bubbles

Man as microcosm—-schema of influences. From Livres des Portraits et Figures du
Corps human , 1572 , ed. Jacques Kerver

field. Where desire flares up, an already existent, latent belonging
of the subject to the desired becomes manifest; hence is no
private property when it comes to longing for the other. For the
psychologists of antiquity, that shared element which supplies
the desirous and the desired from the same source reveals itself
in the beautiful. Whatever humans desire from the other is—
located on the right level—also a response to the attraction and
accommodation of the other side. In this sense, being and
attracting are the same thing. Hence intersubjective magic is
based on the magic of completion, as described classically by
Plato in the speech of Aristophanes from The Symposium with
the myth of the human halves passionately striving towards one

Kenans m the Magsc Crcle / 209

another. According to Plato, the binding forces between lovers
come from a homesick longing for the round totality, whose
traces point to the prehistory of the great couple. Like all
mythical totalities, the round, autarchic primordial human is
subject to the triple dramaturgical rhythm of primal com¬
pleteness, separation catastrophe and restoration. Here this
archaic romantic novel shares the formal law of mythical narrative,
which is also that of dialectics. In this case, telling a story means
wanting to heal the constitutive lovesickness. The maximum
effect of attraction magic naturally lies between the second and
third acts of the drama, when the bodies separated in the sec¬
ond act begin preparing for reunification. Where the severed
halves find one another again we witness the abrupt formation
of the interpersonal magic circle, which encloses the newly
inseparable two like an invisible isolation tank. According to
Platos wise words, the radical-symbiotic couple would perish in
there if its members did not have a means, in the form of
relaxed genitality, of temporarily leaving each other alone and
wriggling out of the totalitarian relationship. In Plato's account,
genital sexuality was a later gift from the compassionate gods,
who could not bear to see how the reunited half-humans, over¬
whelmed by a blind panic of embrace, forgot all their
self-preservation and perished. From the perspective of the
Platonic myth of the severed primordial human halves, sexuality
appears as a valve added after the fact to contain excessive
symbiotic pressure; a secondary eroticism whose task is to
divert the totalitarian suction of primary eroticism. The second
eros, the drive-controlled and relaxable form, is freed from the
burden of the first, insatiable eros, which will only tolerate one
thing—radiant fulfillment. Through sexual union, the lovers

210 / Bubbles

Salvador Dali, Harmonic Composition , drawing, 1947

effect an intrinsically valuable distraction from the thing they
truly desire from each other. What this true object of desire
might be is a matter on which the erotology of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and the love theories of the meta¬
physical tradition would scarcely agree. According to the
refined theorems of recent psychoanalysis, all primary eroticism

Htmans in -re Magic Circle / 211

is based on a homesick yearning for the world-impoverished
completeness of the fetus and the sheltered newborn—in the
language of B6la Grunberger, the longing for the narcissistic
monads mode of being and prenatal “autonomy/’ 1 According
to Marsilio Ficinos commentary on Plato’s Symposium , however,
the first eros is nothing but the longing to regain the bliss of
possessing God {beatitudio quae in possessione ipsius [Dei] consistit).
Because the first eros is founded on memory and homecoming—
unlike the second, whose nature consists in curiosity and
reaching out—Ficino, following Plato, must assume a lost primal
presence of the soul in God. Without the ineradicable experience
of his transcendent honeymoon with the absolute, the lover
could not carry within himself any guiding idea of the state at
which his desire is directed. Thus Platonism and psychoanalysis,
for all the differences between their views of the amorous
dramas substantial point of departure, do agree in the definition
of its form: both teach that the primary, pre-concrete and
super-concrete eros has its source in an obscured, never entirely
forgettable and still ever-igniting biune past.

The first depth psychology of the Modern Age, as stated above
in an anticipatory remark, emerged during the second half of
the fifteenth century as a result of impulses from Florentine
Neoplatonism. The criterion for depth-psychological thought
can be considered fulfilled if mental and emotional processes are
divided into an experienced front side and an unexperienced
reverse—in such a way that the subjects learn to understand
themselves in new ways through this distinction. Such models
describe experiences through processes that, though they
affect these experiences, are not represented as such in them;

2127 Bubbles

nonetheless, the act of experiencing is itself reconfigured
through insight into its psychological workings—partly by
diverting interest, partly through cathartic reactions. It is pre¬
cisely this mode of thought, which characterizes numerous
modern psychological concepts from hypnosis to reframing,
that we see forging ahead in Marsilio Ficinos theory of animal
love. This, not his largely sterile superelevations of Platonic eros,
which he terms Socratic, is where the originality of his contri¬
bution to a modern erotology lies. In his praise for the Socratic
form of love, the author scarcely manages to break away from
the conventions of idealism and its projections into the field of
medieval love for God; in his reproach of vulgar love, however,
Ficino—the son of the Medicis’ personal physician—becomes
one of the first phenomenologists of intersubjective enchant¬
ments. With the eye of a psychotherapist avant la lettre , he
elevates the fascination of humans with their kind to a subject
in its own right. Ficino remarks that humans normally do well
what they do often—except in amorous matters, for “we all love
constantly in some way, but almost all of us love only badly
(tutti quasi amiamo male); and the more we love, the worse we
love (e quanto piii amiamo , tano peggio amiamo)? It would not
be an exaggeration to call the seventh speech from De amore one
of the founding documents of modern depth psychology.
Already here, as in its later versions, pathology becomes the
window to the soul through which the philosopher gazes in
order to observe the inner workings of the machine.

Ficinos psychopathology describes the amor vulgaris
between individuals of the same or different sex as a result of
subtle inflections through the eye. According to well-known
Platonic doctrine, seeing does not simply mean being affected by

Huirans iir the Magic Circle / 213

impressions of illuminated objects, but rather actively directing
visual rays at them. The eye is itself sun-like to the extent that it
illuminates objects with a light sui generis . The visual rays shoot
forth like the projectiles of a cognitive artillery and the existing,
espied world is the bulls eye. At the same time, Ficino speaks of
the world-espying ray as a transporter for ethereal essences sent
out by the viewer. If one ventures the experiment of taking these
concepts seriously, one can easily appreciate how Ficino reaches
his understanding of ocular infections. When the gazes of humans
meet, the space between their eyes is compacted into a highly
charged radiation field and becomes the scene of a micro-drama
of energies; interpenetrations must develop between gaze and
counter-gaze, and it is the stronger gaze that injects its content—
especially life spirits in the form of the finest vapores —into the
others eye. Thus the intersubjective space appears as a battlefield
of life spirits that affect others through the eyes, but also through
other forms of bodily radiation. Ficino remarks on this:

Aristotle writes that women, when the menstrual blood flows
down, often soil a mirror with bloody drops by their own
gaze. This happens, I think, from this: that the spirit, which
is a vapor of the blood, seems to be a kind of blood so thin
that it escapes the sight of the eyes, but becoming thicker on
the surface of a mirror, it is clearly observed. [..*]. Therefore,
what wonder is it if the eye, wide open and fixed upon some¬
one, shoots the darts of its own rays into the eyes of the
bystander, and along with those darts, which are the vehicles
of the spirits, aims that sanguine vapor which we call spirit?
Hence the poisoned dart pierces through the eyes, and since
it is shot from the heart of the shooter, it seeks again the heart

214/Bubbles

of the man being shot, as its proper home. [...] Hence follows
a double bewitchment (duplex fascinatio). The sight of a
stinking old man or of a woman suffering her period bewitches
a boy, and the sight of a youth bewitches an older person, but
since the humor of an older person is cold and very slow, it
hardly reaches the back of the heart in the boy, and being
awkward in making the transit, it moves the young heart very
little, unless the heart, because of extreme youth, is very tender.

But that bewitchment is very heavy by which a young man
transfixes the heart of an older man. 2

Despite its bizarre physiological concepts, which have long
ceased to find any defenders, this discourse unmistakably belongs
to the field of modern depth-psychological theories in structural
terms, for it describes and conveys the experience of love as the
effect of a non-experienceable psychophysiological process. At
the same time, a latent idea of the unconscious is already present
in Ficinos model: it belongs to the nature of neo-academically
understood animal love that it is an effect of fascinogenic
processes which can only be experienced by the subjects in their
results, but not in their actual physiological mechanisms. By
disclosing the psycho mechanical reverse of experienced erotic
passions, Ficinos discourse on vulgar love encourages the subjects
concerned—in the style of modern psychodynamic enlighten¬
ment—to use the insight into the mechanically functioning
components of their psychological apparatus to draw practical
conclusions about how to cure themselves of pathological
compulsions. From now on, someone experiencing vulgar or
natural love would be in the picture about the mechanical reason
for his exuberant desire for union with the other. Now he knows

Humans in the Magic Circle /215

that he is suffering the mental side effects of an ocularly trans¬
mitted infection with foreign blood; consequently, he is armed
with the enlightening knowledge to step back from his passion
and reflect upon it. It is the blood of the other, absorbed unno¬
ticed and animated by foreign life spirits, that moves the lovers
to send their semen into their partner, or to burn to take up
the others ejaculate in themselves. Once one realizes that the
frenzied desire for touching and unification is simply an effect of
unconscious transfusions, one has already taken the first step
towards disenchantment and cure. This step remains impossible,
admittedly, as long as the unfortunate succumbs to the com¬
pulsion to view his misery as something that will end in pleasure
after all; only once a critical level of suffering has prepared him
for conversion can he seek philosophical guidance in learning a
form of love that promises greater happiness. Where de-fascination
succeeds, he will be freed from the compulsion to act on the wish
for union. Where it does not, the subject risks repeating the fate
of Artemisia, whose dreary excess is mentioned by Ficino as a
cautionary example:

That lovers desire to take the whole beloved into themselves
Artemisia, the wife of King Mausolus of Caria, also showed, who
is said to have loved her husband beyond the belief of human
affection and to have ground up his body, when he died, into a
powder, and to have drunk it ( ebibisse ), dissolved in water. 3

As shown by the example of husband-drinking—which also
meant the continuation of incestuous excesses by other means, as
tradition has it that Mausolus and Artemisia were siblings—the
peculiarity of Ficino s theory of vulgar love lies in the fact that it

216 / Bud Wes

by no means explains the lovers longing for union with an inde¬
pendent drive towards the genital object, but presents it as a
doomed displacement of the symbiotic primary eros to the stage
of sexual relations; coming five hundred years before Freud,
Lacan and Kohut, this discovery is itself awaiting rediscovery.
Admittedly, genital love as such would still have to wait a long
time for its psychological justification; for centuries, the sexualized
dual stood in the shadow of the magic dyad. Dual eroticism only
managed to establish itself in its own right once the restoration
of Jewish ethics had overcome the predominance of Greek
philosophy in the contemporary balance of theories. It is not out
of the question that this might one day be perceived retrospec¬
tively as the main event in the process of twentieth-century
intellectual history The ethics of psychoanalysis is, as one knows,
rooted in the Jewish understanding of the law—it does not
encourage merging, but constantly makes the case for construc¬
tive separations; its focus is not intimate fusion, but rather the
discretion of the subject in relation to the other. The law itself is
primarily there to bring out the distance between God and man,
extending to all details of everyday life. Admittedly the limits of
the philosophically renewed Jewish dual ethics become apparent
in its tendency to underestimate the infants claim to intimacy:
Freud s weakness, the unwillingness to think the mother, remains
that of Emmanuel Levinas, whose theory of the strong relationship
between humans and their neighbors is excessively biased
towards the father-son relationship. 4

From Ficinos neo-Greek perspective, it is at least clear that
sexualized enchantment can only lead to disappointment and
exhaustion. His analysis of intersubjective fascination presents
sensual love as a case of incorrectly addressed homesickness

Humans in me Magic Circle / 217

for the bipolarly integrated, microspheric primal state. Con¬
sequently, he views a conversion to the Socratic mode of love
as the only promising method for curing oneself of vulgar
love; only one who loves like the philosophers can place the
correct address on the love letter of existence. When all merely
human objects of love are potentially tormenting and disap¬
pointing, the divine super-object guarantees that one can
shine the light of undisappointable kindness at the chosen
adorant. Here Ficino remains tied to a medieval starting position:
he still displays the theologians disgust at the expectation that
one could rely on mere humans to satisfy the highest needs of
the soul. He repeats as a philosopher the monastic oath to
allow completion by none other than God. The first erotology
of the Modern Age could already have had the line from
Kafka as its motto; “I came into this world with a beautiful
wound; that is all I was furnished with.” But at least, when a
philosophical approach to desire fit for the Modern Age
emerged in Florence in the late autumn of the Middle Ages,
its concern was for this beautiful wound not to be closed up
with any hastily-prepared dressings.

More than a century after Ficino, Giordano Bruno embedded
the early modern magic of intersubjectivity in a general theory of
discrete mutual bonds between objects. In his magical writings—
which have only recently been translated into German 5
—especially the treatise “A General Account of Bonding” (De
vinculis in genere), Bruno developed, in a sort of cosmo-eroto-
logical tone, a theory of strong interdependencies or
correspondences between energy poles. Here the bond— vin¬
culum —is the key concept; it forms the basis for an ontology

218/Bubbles

of discrete multiple attractions. According to this ontology,
the meaning of being for all things is no more or less than a
play of constantly moving, manifold affiliations with corre¬
sponding elements.

The bond thus consists in a certain correspondence not only
between the members amongst themselves, but also in a certain
corresponding disposition of the captor and the captive, if I may
put it like this. [...] The bond does not capture the soul unless
it can tie and bind; it does not bind it unless it reaches it; and it
does not reach it unless it can be captured by something. In
general the bond reaches the soul through knowledge, ties it
through the affect, attracts it through pleasure [...]. (pp. 170£)

The bond is not the same in every binder, not in every¬
one who is bound, (p. 172)

The binding occurs most strongly when the bond trans¬
ports somediing of the binder, or when the binder controls
something else through something of his own. Thus the fin¬
gernails and hair of the living are sufficient to gain control of
the entire body [...]. (p. 174)

We use a different bond each time to kiss children, our
father, our sister, our wife, our female friend, a whore or a
friend, (p. 176)

Nothing is bound unless it has been prepared in a very
suitable fashion [...]. (p. 172)

The bond does not act in the same way from everything or
on everything, nor always, but rather in the corresponding
disposition on that which is correspondingly disposed, (p. 174)

The bound flows to the binder through all the senses to
such a degree that, when a complete binding has occurred, he

Humans In' the Magic Circle / 219

will wish to cross over to it or enter it, assuming it is the bond
of desire, (p. 200)

It is not possible to bind someone for oneself unless the
binding element is itself committed to them [...]. A woman
[...] will not actually be bound by a male friend unless he is
also actually bound to her. (p. 211)

In Brunos thought, we find impulses from the older Florentine
magic of intersubjectivity elaborated into a general ontology of
attraction; this ontology integrates the psychology of interde¬
pendency into a comprehensive system of natural magic. For the
thinkers of the early Modern Age, magic was a cipher for the art
of conceiving of things and living beings as enclosed and per¬
vaded by specific interdependencies. At all levels of being, the
relationships between things—in magological terms, their
binding power and bindability—take priority over their being-
in-itself. Hence for Bruno the dullest people, the idiotically
closed-up, are the least bindable, whereas the most brilliant indi¬
viduals resonate in a world-fulfilled concert of bondings,
elevating themselves to operators or achievers of multiple creative
effects. The early Modern Age used magical terminology to
communicate about the human being who will make it his
business to perform acts hitherto believed impossible. What the
sixteenth century, the great time of empowerment and increase
in Europe, called the magus was the encyclopedically sensitive,
polyvalently cosmopolitan human who learned how to cooperate
attentively and artfully with the discrete interdependencies
between the things populating a highly communicative uni¬
verse. The magus, as the shared prototype of the philosopher,
the artist, the doctor, the engineer and the computer scientist, is

220 / Bucb es

no less than the operator-coupler in the world of correspondences,
influences and attractions. He is the agent and meta-psychologist
of the world s soul, whose universal expansion causes “everything
to approach everything else” (p. 149). Bruno, the Dominican
friar who broke out of his order, discarded the hood of monastic
reverence for the eternally unchanging One along with the
orders compulsions; in escaping the pull of the mystical light,
he emancipated himself to become the thinker of a divine
matter that was manifold and developed in changing partner¬
ships, as well as its traces in the consciousness. As a Columbus
of the Atlantic of relationships, he also discovered a new coast
for the heroic homesickness of the soul that, like the legendary
American one, presents a worldly hereafter in the world freed
of boundaries. 6

Alongside Bruno s body of magological writings, it is above
all the work of William Shakespeare in which the ideas of influ¬
ence and correspondence from the philosophy of the early
Modern Age culminate. As Rene Girard has shown in his study
on Shakespeare's dramatic plots, the plays of the master from
Stratford-upon-Avon form a collection of investigations into
the inflammability of humans through the “fire of envy.” 7 His
worlds of interrelations mirror social ensembles in which indi¬
viduals incessantly infect one another with their desire for
power and lust. Shakespeare's protagonists operate like psycho¬
logical batteries charged by connection to the high tensions of
rivalry—the only thing they can call their own is the infectability
by images that direct their desire, and their excitability by the
imitation of violence, under whose influence they keep up with
their intense competitors in chaotic escalations. Throughout
the darkening psychocosm of Shakespeare’s late works we find

H.nans <n the Mage Greta / 221

an increasingly cruel analysis of that mimetic plague which
turns those it infects into media for rapt envy and escalating
imitative compulsions. In this sense, those literary sociologists
who see a reflex of the emerging bourgeois-imperialistic society
of competition in Shakespeare’s dramatic universe may not be
entirely wrong.

A fascination analysis of the first European depth psychology
reveals two things about the nature of bipolar intimacy: as
vulgar love, the attraction to the other constitutes the effect of a
present infection through foreign life spirits; as sublime love, the
yearning for the other is the effective trace left by the memory
of coexistence with God. The present thus appears as the time
of possession, 8 and the past as that of ecstasy. If the organ of the
vulgar drive for union is the attraction and bonding system
comprising the eyes, blood and heart, followed by its genital
supplement, the organ of the longing for union with the sub¬
lime subject-object is the memory. Thus, under Plato’s renewed
stimulus in the center of the reopened question of the nature of
intimacy, the deeper question of the possibility of memory
appears. Neoplatonic analysis provides the tools to understand
intimacy no longer simply as spatial proximity—neither
between hearts nor between feces or genitally connected bodies;
intimacy as memory introduces temporal depth into the play of
attractable bodies by staging present closeness as the repetition
of a past closeness. This sets in motion a thought based on con¬
cepts of transference: the agent of repetition is the archetypally
powerful afterglow of an older state in the current one. Intimacy
is time regained—in Platonic terms, time in God, and in psy¬
choanalytical terms, the prehistoric biunity of the mother-child
space. Following the path staked out by Plato’s theory of

222/ Bubcles

memory, the depth psychology of the Modern Age revealed the
essential historicity of everything concerning the soul. It shows
how, in certain passions referred to by Renaissance thinkers as
heroic, one finds the magnetism of a prenatal antiquity shining
into the psychological present.

The second major formation of European depth psychology—
the complex of animal magnetism, artificial somnambulism and
hypnotism—which expanded into a multi-faceted therapeutic¬
literary universe primarily in Germany and France between
1780 and 1850, 9 is connected by numerous lines of tradition to
the doctrines of early modern psycho-cosmo-erotology. This
applies above all to the magnetosophical concepts that were
passed on in almost unbroken continuity—albeit with increasing
opposition—from the magi of the Renaissance, namely Paracel¬
sus, Gilbert and van Helmont, via Jakob Bohme and Athanasius
Kircher (Magnes sive de arte magnetica, Rome, 1641), to New¬
ton and finally Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), the true
initiator of Romantic-magnetopathic medicine. In the case of
Mesmer and his French school, however, the Platonic-anamnestic
aspect retreated to the background in favor of a theory of pre-
sentist interdependencies between physical emanations of
planetary and animal kinds. Nonetheless, Mesmers impulse
would enable Romantic psychology’s understanding of magical-
interpersonal intimacy to break through to a completely new
understanding of the psyche as a memory of primal subjective
relationships. Like Freud later on, Mesmer already used scien¬
tism as a productive pretext for innovative arrangements in the
dramatic-intersubjective intimate space. Mesmers patho-philo-
sophical approach, which had been fixed in most aspects since

Humans, in th«j Mayo Ocie./ 223

his Vienna medico-physical dissertation On the Influence of the
Planets on the Body from 1766, was based on cosmological
notions of an interstellar attraction and a universal fluid that,
through proliferation, reaches all bodies, mineral and animal
alike, in the manner of magnetic radiation. It is not out of the
question that Mesmer elaborated his doctrine from impulses in
the work of the English doctor and natural philosopher Richard
Mead (1673-1754), Newtons physician. For Mesmer, a psy¬
chology divorced from cosmology and general physics did not
yet exist. His understanding of the intimate scarcely includes
any references to the psychology of the individual; for him,
humans are simply animal magnets that, like all other bodies,
are moved about in a fiuidal concert of inflows and outflows. If
one transfers these nature-philosophical maxims to the erotic-
personal sphere, one arrives directly at those psychochemical or
magnetic elective affinities which Goethe integrated into the
experimental strategy of his daring novel. Mesmer s significance
for the spectacular and suspiciously viewed innovations of
Romantic psychotherapy is due most of all to the fact that his
easily imitable magnetopathic method triggered a wave of fol¬
low-up attempts in which new strategies for close encounters
between healer and patient, artist and audience, and finally
leader and mass could be acted out. Just as the alternative move¬
ments of the twentieth century were also influenced by wild
psychoanalysis, the Romantic period from 1780 until the mid¬
nineteenth century was an age of wild magnetism—and only
the fact that the seriously practiced magnetopathic approach in
the healing arts did not manage to distinguish itself sufficiently
in the public view from its wild forms, not least its overgrowth
through spiritism, led to its science-historical catastrophe.

224./E3u0bi©3

Mesmers treatments brought impulses for new reflections on
unusual intimate constellations to the doctors’ practices, and to
those parts of the public involved in discussion and experimen¬
tation. His idea that all bodies encounter one another as carriers
of magnetic forces in an ether of animal gravity gave countless
individuals of his time opportunity to expose themselves to
ambiguous experiments with non-bourgeois experiences of
attraction and closeness. These led to the far-reaching discovery
of what was termed magnetic rapport, which, in today s termi¬
nology, could most feasibly be described as a transference
relationship between the analyst and the analysand using archaic
steps of regression. In 1784, Mesmer, who viewed himself to the
end as a physicist-doctor rather than a psychologist, set out the
principles of his curative method in a series of fundamental
theorems at a Parisian secret society he had founded, speaking
to a group of selected students including such contemporary
and later celebrities as the brothers Puysegur, General Lafayette,
the lawyer Bergasse, George Washington and the banker Korn-
rnann. A pirated edition from 1785, reprinted several times,
made the central features of Mesmers lectures—against the
authors protests—known to a wider public. A comparison
between these Aphorismes de M. Mesmer, dictes a Vassemblee deses
Eleves [Aphorisms of Mesmer, Dictated to the Gathering of His
Students] and the later, authorized overview of his work by the
Berlin doctor Karl Christian Wolfart, Mesmerismus oder System
der Wechselwirkungen [Mesmerism, or, System of Interdepen¬
dencies] (Berlin: In der Nikolaischen Buchhandlung, 1814),
shows that the Parisian transcripts are mostly reliable. This
early collection of 344 theorems on animal magnetism
includes the following:

Hunans h the Magic Circe / 225

§79. There is a fixed law of nature that a reciprocal influence
on all bodies exists, and this consequently affects all their
constituent parts and properties.

§80. This reciprocal influence and the relationships
between all coexistent bodies constitute what one calls
magnetism.

§141. The condition of sleep in humans consists in the
quantity of movement lost during waking being restored
through the properties of the general currents surrounding
them.

§160. Humans are constantly situated within general
and particular currents, and are permeated by these.

§161. Currents exit and enter the most protruding parts
or extremities [...].

§184. It is verifiable, and supported by strong a priori
reasons, that we are also gifted with an inner sense that is
connected to the whole universe

§238. If two beings are affecting each other, their
respective positions are not insignificant. Two beings have
the greatest influence on each other if they are placed in
such a way that their similar parts are precisely opposed.
Consequently, two people must be face to face in order to
have the strongest possible effect on each other. In this posi¬
tion they can be viewed as if they only constituted a single
whole. From this it follows that one must touch the right
side with the left arm and vice versa in order to maintain the
harmony of the whole [...],

§309. There is only one sickness and only one cure;
health consists in the complete harmony of all our organs
and their functions. Sickness is merely deviation from this

226/Babies

Drawings by Mesmer explaining the system of interdependencies, from
Karl Christian Wolfart $ book of the same name

Humer-s jn Magic Circle / 227

harmony. The cure therefore consists in restoring the harmony
that has been disturbed.

§333. No sickness can be cured without crisis; the crisis is
the striving of nature to disperse the obstacles inhibiting the
circulation by an increase in movement, tone and tension.

§334, If nature alone is not sufficient to produce crises,
one supports it through magnetism [...]. 10

Because of their elemental and suggestive character, Mesmers
doctrines could easily be appropriated, verified and modified in
a variety of applications by enthusiasts as well as skeptical and
curious experimenters. F. A. Murhards 700-page opus Versuch
einer historisch-chronologischen Bibliographie des Magnetismus
[Attempt at a Historical-Chronological Bibliography of Mag¬
netism] (Kassel: Griesbach, 1797) gives a rough idea of the
epidemic effect of Mesmers impulses. Barely twenty-five years
after Mesmers emergence in Vienna during the 1770s, his ideas
had developed into a turbulent and complex subculture. In the
age of Romantic medicine, this subculture expanded into a
major literary and clinical power. There are few cases in intel¬
lectual history where such an overwhelming proliferation of an
idea was followed by such comprehensive secondary amnesia.
This latter is not only due, however, to the aforementioned sci¬
entific discrediting of therapeutic magnetism through its
theatrical and dubious imitators; one must also assume that the
drive coming from Mesmers ideas to experiment with inter¬
personal dissolutions of boundaries was destined to be thwarted
by the general psychohistorica] tendency in the later nineteenth
and twentieth centuries to lend greater definition to bourgeois
society's system of ego delimitations. With the progress of

228 / Bubbles

Wol farts baquet

hunons c the Magic Circle / 229

goods trading society and individualistic abstraction, as well as
the tendency towards the establishment of a more pronounced
asymmetry of power between doctors and laypersons, the first
great boom in ego-transcending magnetopathic methods
petered out. It was only around 1900, primarily through the
synergetic effect of Nietzsche s writings and the life-reforming
ideas of the commune, that a second wave of interpersonal con¬
cepts for the dissolution of boundaries came about—bringing
forth, among others, the psychoanalytical schools of Vienna
and Zurich, which had to pay considerable tribute to the
stricter norms affecting bourgeois and scientistic rules of dis¬
tance from the start. From a psychohistorical perspective,
animal magnetism seems like a preliminary school for the
Dionysian subversion of forms of bourgeois subjectivity as
postulated by artists of the twentieth century; the path of the
bourgeois subject from a magnet to a divine animal was shorter
than established cultural history chose to acknowledge. The
third wave—the counterculture movement of the 1960s, which
was able to follow on from both its Romantic and vitalistic
forerunners—is currently being thwarted by the heightened
individualism characterizing the current thrust of telematic
abstraction, as well as the aestheticistic neo-isolationism of
postmodern lifestyle propaganda.

Around 1800, the magnetopathic arrangements of close¬
ness gave rise to a wealth of far-reaching psychological
discoveries within a very short time. Especially §238 quoted
above, which clarifies the magnetopathic face-k-face as a form
of bio-energetic communion, gives an inkling of the explosive
procedures of closeness with which Romantic doctors and
healers had begun to experiment. While Mesmer had believed

Hi.rna'-'S in the Magic Circle / 231

Ebenezer Sibly, Mesmensmus: Der Operator lost eine hypnotische Trance aus [Mes¬
merism: the operator triggers a hypnotic trance], copperplate, 1794

that he was simply effecting a fluidal equivalent of the tides
in the individual human body, many of his students and
emulators trained as authentic psychologists—though here
the term “psychology” does not refer to the modern academic

232 / Bubbles

discipline but rather a general study of relationships, experi¬
ences and transformations. Armand-Marie Jacques de
Chastenet, Marquis de Puysegur (1751-1825), who estab¬
lished a large practice of his own on his country estate in
Buzancy near Soisson after studying with Mesmer in Paris,
increasingly concentrated on an aspect of magnetopathic
treatment neglected by Mesmer, namely the phenomenon
known as “critical sleep”—a hypnotoid depth regression of
the patient tied to the presence of the magnetizer that often
led to states of mental lucidity with heightened sensory per¬
ception and self-diagnostic insight. Puysegur liked to conduct
his treatments under magnetized trees to which the patients
were connected with ropes—these are the magic trees of the
folk medicine tradition, whose significance for intellectual
history has only recently been reaffirmed. For Puysegur, what
he termed “artificial somnambulism” was the royal road to
magnetopathic healing; he employed lucid trances to implant
his will to heal the patient in the latter like an unconscious
imperative. At the same time, he allowed his patients an
autonomous participation unknown in any other form of
medical relationship by drawing decisive information about the
causes of their complaints, and hence about suitable remedies,
from their own introspections and self-prescriptions while in
magnetic trance. Puysegur initiated the reinterpretation of the
magnetic procedure as a transference of will from the magne¬
tizer to the magnetized—a notion that impressed the thinkers
of German idealism in particular.

From this emphasis on the will as the true agent of magnetic
therapies, Immanuel Kant concluded that even self-healing
through the will—the “sheer resolution” 11 —must be possible;

Hi mars in tfie Magic Ciroe / 233

Goya, Blind Mans Buff, 1797

he thus became, almost a hundred years before Emile Coue
(1857-1926), the discoverer of autosuggestion. Schellings
natural philosophy offers a comprehensive rationalization of
animal magnetism; he himself tested magnetopathic proce¬
dures on people in his immediate circle—albeit with little
success—and had connections throughout his life to a milieu
of magnetizers and sympathizers of mesmerism. Among the
most prominent of these were his younger brother, the state
physician-in-chief Karl Eberhard von Schelling (1783-1854), 12
and the philosopher of religion Karl August Eschenmayer

234 / Buboles

The elm tree in Buzancy undeT which Puysegur conducted magnctopathic treatments

(1786-1862). 13 Franz Xaver von Baader, Schelling’s inspirer
and colleague from his Munich days, referred extensively to
phenomena of sleepwalking and magnetic lucidity in his
writings on philosophical anthropology; 14 in his reflections on
religious eroticism he further developed motifs from early
modern enchantment analysis: “Love alone [...] does not
separate [...] possessing from being possessed or allowing one¬
self to be possessed.” 15 Fichte, in his late works, likewise
turned to the study of magnetopathic theories and attended
curative treatments of the Berlin Mesmerian Wolfart, who had

Humans in :ix* Magic Circle / 235

one of the first German teaching positions for animal mag¬
netism; by establishing such posts at universities, the Prussian
minister Hardenberg, himself an adherent of Mesmer s ideas,
and Wilhelm von Humboldt contributed—not least under
the influence of the royal physician Johann Ferdinand Kor-
eff—to the academic recognition of magnetism. After Berlin
(Wolfart) and Bonn (Nasse, Ennemoser), the medical depart¬
ments of the universities in Halle (Kruckenberg), Giessen
(Wilbrand) and Jena (Kieser) also set up professorships for
animal magnetism. Hegel integrated a considerable amount
of mesmerist literature into his lectures on anthropology,
which can still—especially in their copious verbal supple¬
ments—be read as some of the most complex discussions of
the phenomena, principles and successes of magnetopathic
psychology. 16 It is precisely the “oral Hegel” that testifies to
the unbreakable bond between German Idealism and the first
depth psychology.

Schopenhauers high opinion of the new discipline came
from the possibility of claiming Puysegur s interpretation of the
magnetopathic agent for his own metaphysics of the will, as
precisely that will:

Further, because the will manifests itself in Animal Magnetism
downright as the thing in itself, we see the principium indi¬
viduation is (Space and Time), which belongs to mere
phenomenon, at once annulled: its limits which separate indi¬
viduals from one another, are destroyed; Space no longer
separates magnetizer and somnambulist; community of
thoughts and the motions of the will appears [...]. 17

2 36/ Buboes

Key co the symbols used, from Bergasse, La theorie du monde et des etres organises,
suivant les prinapes de M.(esmer); gravee d'A.OR [The Theory of the World and
Organised Beings, Following the Principles of Mesmer; engraved by A.OE]

Hunans r the IVteao Circle / 237

Furthermore, the effects of mesmerism were by no means
restricted to its German school, even if that is where it managed
to receive the highest academic and literary honors, primarily
through its philosophical reception and amalgamation with ide¬
alistic philosophy. The motifs of Mesmer and Puysegur are also
ubiquitous in the French literature of the post-Napoleonic era;
they inspire not only the Romantic Catholicism of the European
Restoration, but also some of the early socialist systems, namely
those of Saint-Simon and Fourier, in which Mesmer-like theories
of attraction and gravitation, as well as the beginnings of a moral
mechanics in the style of Pierre-Hyazinth Azats’ compensation
theory, play a decisive part. It is unnecessary to explain at greater
length how all these motifs come together in the most significant
narrative project of the nineteenth century: Balzac’s Comidie
humaine is simultaneously a world theater of moral and mental
gravitational forces. 18

With Puysegurs deviation, the step from physics to psycho¬
dynamics, and from the energization to the intimization of the
doctor-patient relationship, was complete. From that point on,
the field of bipolar-interpersonal intimacy research was open; the
way was paved for a reinterpretation of the psyche as a staged
memory of the oldest relationships and a reproducer of past exis¬
tential situations. Now the soul could be conceived of as a field
of interpersonal resonances—even if numerous psychologists to
this day have not realized the full possibilities offered by the
magnetopathic experiment and its scenological rationalization.
Mesmer himself, incidentally, opposed this transformation of his
depth physics, probably mainly because the ahistorical nature of
his theory of currents had no space for an introduction of time
into the body. His physicalistic axiom that all solid bodies swim

238 / Bubbles

in currents of subtle matter remained entirely connected to
presentist processes, excluding the notion of memories that
affect events in the body and in relationships.

The fruitful moment in the theoretical penetration of magneto-
pathic empiricism, which had grown immeasurably within a
short time—and whose curative successes were to be viewed
critically, but scarcely contested—came with the encounter
between animal magnetism and early Romantic natural philoso¬
phy. To our knowledge, there is no record of any personal
exchange between Mesmer and Schelling. But the numerous
shared students led, as early as the 1900s, to those hybrids of the
two streams of thought that produced the originary form of
modern genetic psychology—the Jena, Weimar and Berlin
schools of proto-psychoanalysis, so to speak. Where Mesmer s
quasi-pantheistic fluidal physics and Schelling s ideas on the tem-
poralization of nature came into contact, the critical spark was
ignited that would develop into an evolutionary theory of matters
of the soul and a classics of the life of intimate relationships.

The new alliance of the magnetopathic experiment in close¬
ness and evolutionary natural philosophy reached its early
climax in Friedrich Hufelands essay UeberSympathie [On Sym¬
pathy], published in Weimar in 181T Hufeland (1774-1839)
was court physician to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and the
younger brother of the well-known doctor and author
Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, whose book Makrobiotik oder
die Kunst, das menschlicbe Leben zu verlangern [Macrobiotics,
or, The Art of Prolonging Human Life] (Jena, 1796) initiated
modern dietary science. Impressed by Schellings theory of
nature as the rise of matter to self-awareness, he converted to a

Hunans in the Mage Ocle / 239

worldview that subsumed the whole of nature under the con¬
cept of the organism. Here one still finds elements of older
fluidistic concepts, which proved effortlessly combinable with
the newer organism-based thought. Using the modernized
notion of sympathy, Hufeland articulates the idea of lower and
earlier evolutionary forms of the organic—especially the vege¬
tative or herbaceous “sphere”—generally characterized by a
capacity for passivity in relation to external influences. Animals
already set themselves apart from the plant world by mobilizing
independent activity and greater individuation. For Hufeland,
the evolutionary sequence from minerals to plants, lower
animals, higher animals and humans constitutes a rise of the
organic from a mostly passive to a mostly active state—mani¬
fested in its highest form in human geniuses, who have achieved
the unity of free moral self-determination and inventive-technical
co-productiveness with nature. With the organism’s increased
individualization and active selfhood, the passive-sympathetic
aspect of being falls to a negligible level—that is why man, as
the most self-active being in the sequence of natural creatures,
is simultaneously the most independent and the most open to
the call of freedom. Nonetheless, even man, as the evolutionary
product with the highest spontaneity index, is still susceptible
to being affected by sympathetic influences from other living
beings, especially in a state of vegetative introversion, during
sleep and in states of fading self-awareness—but most of all in
the case of a pathological disorganization of selfhood forces. In
such a condition, the independent will of the sense of freedom
and activity, normally largely immune to influences, is loosened
and opens up the individual to the subtle effects of magnetic
currents; Mesmers term for these forces was “floodabilities”

240/ Bubbles

Grandville, Metamorphosis of a Dream , from Another World y 1844

[Flutbarkeiten ]. According to Friedrich Hufeland, the most
important manifestation of the “ability of humans to enter a
sympathetic relationship” 19 lies in the phenomena brought to
light through magnetopathic practices.

Htnans r the Magic Grcle / 241

For nowhere does the relationship we call sympathy* or the
dependence of an individual life on a foreign sphere of life, reveal
itself more clearly than in animal magnetism, whereby the mag¬
netized subject* sacrificing its own individuality as far as possible
without forfeiting its existence, and entering the magnetizers
sphere of life, is subjected to the dominance of the latter to such
a degree that it seems to belong to it as one of its pans, to form
one and the same organism with it. (Ueber Sympathies pp. 107f.)

It is immediately clear in Hufeland s discourse how an object of
fascination, namely sympathy, appears in conjunction with a
scandal: the sacrifice of autonomy. It is characteristic of Romantic
organism philosophies that they happily take this provocation
on board to achieve their higher goal: the mediatization of
humans within comprehensive totalities of life. In Hufeland s
case, this undertaking involves a combination of medical
motives and aspects of the holistic optimism found in Weimar
and Berlin. The totality which the unstable subject is invited to
enter appears on the one hand as the curative magnetopathic
pact between doctor and patient, which aims to be fully infused
with affirmations of trust, and on the other hand as the serene
macrocosmic orb by which the individual, as the God-man in
training, can know that he is enclosed without having to accept
any reduction of his sense of autonomy. For a valuably pre¬
carious moment, philosophical-medical thought attained a
complete balance of autonomy and devotion. Despite such
edifying recommendations, critical contemporaries took exception
to the excessive devotion demanded by magnetism; that already
applied to Mesmer s Vienna phase, which was plagued by suspi¬
cions and jealousies—but all the more to the magnetopathic

242 i Buboles

Anonymous, Crisis Room in Mesmers Parisian Practice , copperplate, c. 1780

movement at the height of its therapeutic and voguish success.
The later nineteenth century, which has rightly been described
as the age of strategic battles over rationality and of critique in
the form of unmasking, advanced the co-evolution of expecta¬
tions of abuse and the practice of distrust so far that Romantic
curative optimism, with its devout joy in the therapeutic acces¬
sibility of the psyche through co-souls, inevitably fell behind the
neo-bourgeois skepticism that sees exploitation, cheating and
deception behind every corner—even among close partners.
The first magnetizers fought this acute resistance from their
contemporaries not only with their euphorias of discovery, but
also through their unwavering faith in the integrity of their own
therapeutic motives. Most of them would scarcely have under¬
stood the later criticisms of their paternalism and the
magical-authoritative climate in which the doctor-patient

Humans in the Magic Circle / 243

encounters took place. For them it was evident in practice that
even strongly asymmetrical psychological relationships, such
as that between magnetizers and somnambulists, can remain
embedded in an intact sphere of shared goodwill and moral
equality. In addition, they could all see the decisive attribute of
the new therapy quite clearly: never before in the history of
healing had the patient been granted such a degree of dignity as
a subject; the magnetopathic movement spawned a literary
genre of case histories, which devoted a level of clinical and
public attention to the patients unknown since the medieval
biographies of mystics. A library of medical reports celebrated
the healing unconscious as the hidden god of the dawning
scientific century. Justinus Kerncr’s biography of Friederike
Hauffe, the “clairvoyant of Prevorst,” Clemens Brentano s notes
on Anna Katharina Emmerich and Friedrich Schlegels diaries of
the magnetic treatment of the Viennese Countess Lesniowska
between 1820 and 1826 are typical monuments of this new
hagiography of the sick. This leads directly, albeit with a con¬
siderably cooler tone, into the case studies of Freud and his
school, and lives on in the auto-pathographic literature of the
twentieth century. Freud in particular was consummately skilled
at turning every medical history into a novella, every neurosis
into an anthropological monument. Romantic medicine loosened
the tongue of sickness and made the patient himself the poet of
its disorganization. As far as the magnetopathic approach is con¬
cerned, the precondition for this was indeed that the patients, as
the magnetizing doctors unconscious assistants, would become
their own co-therapists. Just as the metaphysical age ultimately
acknowledged only God as the one healer, the Romantic age
clung to the principle natura sanat —which then meant that

244 / Bubbles

nature, in the magnetopathically affected patient, would cure
itself as the whole-making unconscious.

Among the numerous authors who wanted to make the agent of
these mysterious two-person healings known, the aforemen¬
tioned name of Friedrich Hufeland, with his attempt at a natural
history of sympathy, stands out especially. It was he who first
stated in public what the psychogenetic key to the hazardous
relationship of closeness in the magnetic cure was:

There is only one relationship in organic nature in which sym¬
pathy expresses itself through the highest degree of dependency
of the one individual on the other in a similar way to animal
magnetism, namely that which we observe in the inseparable
connection between the unborn child and its mother. The two
relationships are essentially quite identical; their difference lies
merely in the external form, and this is determined by the sphere
of the organism that initially and originally enters this relation¬
ship. In animal magnetism we see an immediate dependency of
the real animal functions—sensory activity, in part the voluntary
muscle movements, and at times even higher intellectual activity,
hence what we earlier termed the animal sphere—on the
magnetizer, while the fetus in its vegetative sphere is perfectly
dependent on the mother. The organismic activity of the latter
directly affects that of the fetus; it is connected to the same central
organ [Le. the higher nervous system] that dominates the
mother s sphere; if the mothers heart stops beating, its circulation
is also inhibited, and thus the real source and center of the childs
reproductive activity lies not in itself but rather outside itself, in
the organism of the mother. (Ueber Sympathy pp. 108f.)

Humans in the Ma&ic Girds./ 245

This passage reads like a direct application of Schellings thesis
that the task of science is anamnesis. Scarcely anywhere else,
however, has such a serious attempt been made to—once again
in Schellings words—raise the consciousness to consciousness
through consciousness. Hufelands model of fetal inhabitation of
the mother offers—for the meantime—the most intimate and
historically profound interpretation conceivable of the spheric
union between subjects. For beyond the spatial incorporation of
nascent life in the maternal body, Hufeland also conceives of the
child’s mental constitution as a relationship of direct sympathetic
dependency on the central nervous functions, that is, the
mother’s animal-personal regulative centers. This essentially
posits that the mother magnetizes the child within herself and
animates it with her own, more highly organized life. A similar
claim would be made by Hegel about the prehistory of the
feeling soul in his anthropology lectures; using the leitmotif
“The mother is the genius of the child,” he explains that in the
archaic mother-child relationship* there is only one available
subjectivity for two individuals; the child participates in the self¬
hood of the maternal existence until it has matured into its own,
substantialized being-for-itself. 20 For Hufeland, the fetus is like a
plant in the womb of an animal that subsequently grows into an
animal itself—an animal that will in turn open itself up to the
world of the spirit. According to Schellings natural philosophy,
higher organisms preserve, as if in a somatic memory store, the
integral recollection of their earliest modes of being. This sheds a
first light on the otherwise entirely opaque circumstance that,
between adult human beings, relationships are possible that can
only be comprehended as reproductions of early “vegetative”
ones. Not only is every human organism a result and memory

246 / Bubbles

score of ascending natural-historical processes from the stone to
the sensitive, self-aware life form; each one also holds a memory
chat preserves its own history of becoming since its days in the
mothers womb, and to which, under extraordinary circum¬
stances—such as those created by magnetopathic treatment—
they can return in an informative way. This possibility of return
was the decisive condition of the new healing art; the patients of
magnetism “remembered” a state of their selves, as it were, in
which they were animated and coordinated from the center of
the mother in the mode of ecstatic vegetability.

Like the fetus, the sick of the variety described do not form a
fully closed totality. Their animal sphere easily opens up to the
predominant influence of a foreign organism, and only if they
enter a foreign sphere of life can the energy missing from
their inner life be replaced by forces from without; they take
part in the more perfect life of the organism to which they
are parasitically connected, delighting in an unaccustomed
feeling of health and strength. Hence the life of these sick, like
that of the unborn child, is like the dependent life of plants. For,
like the child in the mothers body the plant is rooted in the soil,
receiving the positive principle of its life partly from without
in the form of light, as those sick receive it through the stimu¬
lating influence of the magnetizer. {Ueber Sympathies pp. 109f.)

Hufeland does not come close to drawing the seemingly obvious
psychotherapeutic conclusions from his bold equation of magnetic
rapport and the dyadic mother-child union during pregnancy
Above all, he avoids any inferences about an earlier fetal life based
on the magnetic lucidity of the patients and their heightened

Humans in the Magic Circle / 247

sensory performance—especially their altered auditory percep¬
tions, the oft-cited displacement of facial perception to the navel
area and other peculiarities of the exceptional magnetic-hypnotic
state. The author holds the key to a general theory of psychic trans¬
ference phenomena in his hands, yet does not quite know which
gate it is meant to open. Hufelands speculative equation of fetus
and plant inevitably blocked the seemingly inevitable progression
of his reflections to an exploration of prenatal consciousness and a
theory of genetic transfer. Connections of this kind were only
developed systematically one hundred and fifty years later by the
practitioners of a renewed prenatal psychology—Gustav Hans
Graber, Alfred Tomatis, Athanassios Kafkalides, Ludwig Janus and
others. Nonetheless, it remains Hufeland’s supreme achievement
to have connected the phenomenon of magnetic rapport to the
history of the embodied relationship memory—not for the first
time, but with irrevocable incisiveness. Hypnosis or magnetopathic
trance is then a reproduction of the fetal position, which often
appears in conjunction with a number of non-regressive mental
acts. At the same time, Hufeland uses the analogy between birth
and recovery to produce the first plausible interpretation of the end
of the treatment and the expiration of the special relationship
between the magnetizer and the magnetized.

But just as the organization of the fetus, through the strength
and nourishment the mother shares with it, gradually attains
the necessary degree of development and completion to lead
an independent life, and just as it separates from the mother
once this goal has been achieved and the shared life of both
is divided into two—in the same way, through the effect of
animal magnetism, the afflicted subject is gradually led back to

248 / Bubbles

a higher level of organismic completion, its animal activity
revived, and, by having the higher functions of its subjective
sphere put into regular effect, it regains its independence and
now no longer requires the immediate influence of a foreign
life. Thus every recovery achieved through animal magnetism
has the same periods as the life of the unborn child until its
separation from the mother, (p. 110)

Repeated application causes a gradual disappearance of
the symptoms that came from the susceptibility of these
patients, and with them the accompanying illnesses. The
organism of the afflicted now begins once more to form a
closed, clearly delimited sphere; their passive state comes to an
end and they regain the independence granted them by nature,
as well as the ability to assert themselves as something positive
in the face of the outside world, (p. 137)

Now a state of indifference between the two subjects
sets in, and, just as the fetus separates from the mother once
it has the strength to lead an independent life, and the
ripened seed from the plant, the cured patient now parts
ways with the magnetizer, and his sympathetic connection
with him, which he now no longer needs nor is able to
maintain, ends. (p. 138)

Hufelands interpretation of illness as a disorganization of
organismic independence led directly to the discovery of the
principle of regression. The vegetative bodily past and archaic
symbiosis return in certain episodes of illness and their magneto-
pathic treatment. Where illness appears, one also observes the
organisms' own tendency to abandon the burden of their indi¬
viduating tension along with their independence and sink back

Hurrians in re Magic Circle / 249

into a diffuse overall relationship with an enclosing and com¬
pleting other. For the patient who is willing to regress, the
magnetizer acts as a form of “uterine cushion.” In keeping with
this, Hufeland’s reflections lead into remarks that can be read
as anticipations of Freud s metapsychological doctrines about
the death instinct; on the other hand, those axioms prove that
psychoanalysis as a whole belongs to Schellings model of a
temporalized nature. In Hufelands diction, death appears as
the fulfillment of a transpersonal sympathy between the indi¬
vidual life and the pan-organism:

This possibility of return to organic unity and independence
distinguishes that partial disorganization and the accompa¬
nying increase of human dependence on external nature
from the complete loss of the inner principle of unity and
the absolute, unbreakable unification with general nature
that we call death; and if the striving for unification with the
whole that is native to every individual, and expresses itself
in the phenomena of sympathy as long as it asserts its exis¬
tence, cannot be fully satisfied, death can be viewed as the
true attainment of this goal. But also in the state of partial
disorganization described above, the human organism enters
a closer connection with nature in general and, sinking to a
lower level of life, approaches the anorganism. (pp. 138f.)

It is notable here that for one brief, dangerous moment, Hufe-
land seems to have approached the limits of his natural
theology. 21 While he places great value everywhere else on
addressing the totality of nature as an encompassing organism
and emphasizing the principle of life as the unifying motif of the

250 / Bubbles

universe, he lets a word slip out in this passage—“anorganism”—
that could be read as the admission of a hidden fear: that nature
as a whole is perhaps not a “womb,” some preserving total life
form, or the obscure foundation of an enfolding animality, but
simply an anorganic aggregate whose totality remains pre-vital,
and in that sense dead. It is, logically enough, the primal pain in
the Romantic idea of nature that nature as a whole contains life,
but cannot—or only in the form of a postulate—be integrated
into the living realm as a whole. Within a narrow space, two
opposing concepts of death come into contact in Hufeland s dis-
course. The first conceives of death in Romantic-holistic terms as
a unification with the pan-organism, while the second under¬
stands it in naturalistic-nihilistic terms as a regression to the
anorganic. The word “anorganism” points to the rupture in the
worlds life-warm shell; it reveals the Enlightenments imposi¬
tion—to conceive of the difference between inside and outside,
between the organic world-womb and the anorganic death
cosmos. Freud s doctrine of the death instinct merely represents
a cooler, more resigned version of this notion of difference. It
makes a concession to the Gnostic idea that it is not death that
infiltrates life, but rather life that appears amid the general
inanimation like a foreign intruder. In this, Enlightenment and
dark Gnosis are allies; they both assert truths distant from
humanity against the self-warming illusion of vitality. Nietzsche
drew the philosophical conclusions from this quandary: “Let us
beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is only
a form of what is dead, and a very rare form.” 22

In the theologically-inclined musings of his late period, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte perceived animal magnetism as a chance to

Humans in me Magic Circle / 251

defend the absolutism of the vital against the deadly imposition
of thinking an autonomous outside. At the same time, he con¬
sidered it a possible way to overcome the nature-philosophical
deficiency that he increasingly saw in his own doctrine and arrive
at a “physicization of idealism/' 23 In September 1813—a few
months before his death (on January 28, 1814)—Fichte visited
the practice, already famous by then, of Professor Karl Christian
Wolfart in Berlin, at 36 Franzosische Strasse, to sit in on a mag¬
netic treatment. 24 Here he became acquainted with the most
mysterious electrotechnical device of its time: Mesmer s inven¬
tion, the baquet , 25 Following this visit, Fichte began a diary in
which he wrote down his observations about Wolfarts practice,
as well as excerpts from his extensive reading of mesmerist and
Puysegurist literature, during the following weeks.

The essence of the conversation with Wolfart is this: magne¬
tizing provides vitality, and thus healing, even without
somnambulism. This latter, he says, is only one of the crises.
While 1 admit that, I do wish to remind him that clairvoyance>
the representation of complete consciousness, is the most
complete and deeply harrowing crisis. Of course, it is an utter
annihilation of selfhood for this very reason. Wolfart thinks it
too great an attack; one should not aim for it, but rather leave
it to nature to choose its most suitable crisis here too... But it
is clear now, he said, that nature will only permit an annihila¬
tion of selfhood in so far as the latter is sick; one must therefore
always offer it the whole. ( Tagebuch , p. 299)

What Hufeland had described as the patient s complete depen¬
dency within the magnetic fusion is dramatized in Fichtes

252 / Bubbles

terminology, with phrases reminiscent of language games from
the mystical tradition, into the annihilation of selfhood. The
pathos of this formulation gives a sense of how the new medi¬
cine was to be connected to the old project of philosophy as the
path to redemption. From Ionia to Jena, “great thought” had
played with the motif of reaching salvation from death and
externality through a living knowledge of essence. Thus also in
Berlin during the autumn of 1813, only a few weeks before the
Battle of Leipzig, in which Fichte had applied in vain to partici¬
pate as a patriotic army chaplain; the Prussian ministry was
presumably unwilling to give its most celebrated professor a
chance to verify his non-belief in death in actual practice.
Furthermore, Fichtes interest in magnetism came from his
long-standing reflections on the nature of the obstacles to his
manifold attempts to convey his own experiences of philosophical
evidence to his audience in a tenable fashion. He was looking
for an academically legitimate and publicistically effective
linguistic equivalent of clairvoyance, that state in which magne¬
tized patients seemed to achieve complete self-transparency. As
a philosopher-priest, it was his ambition to lead his readers and
listeners to the point where it would become evident to them
that their free ego was medially incorporated in Gods self¬
manifestation—in analogy to his own self-descriptions. In
conversation with Wolfart, Fichte explicated to himself the
feeling that his own teaching had always staged a form of logi¬
cal-rhetorical magnetism. In fact, Fichte was no stranger to the
idea that he might succeed in taking away his listeners cum¬
bersome freedom in such a way that they benefited from it like
an initiation into Gods freedom.

Humans in the Magic Circle / 253

Objects of examination: 1) the medium through which the
first will of the magnetizer may here affect the strangers per¬
sonality. 2) The analogy with the sharing of evidence and
convictions. (I shall keep to the latter, as it is of greater inter¬
est.) Why does attention beget attention, sorrow beget
sorrow, etc.? Where does sympathy come from in the first
place? The phenomenon that my listeners understand my
words when they sit before me, but no longer once out of the
auditorium, is of the same kind. [—] (The phenomenon of
great attentiveness diat 1 evoke in my lectures has its limits.
Whence and how? E.g. at the start, when they come out of
curiosity and still become embarrassed or unwilling, it fails.
Who are then the receptive ones? Those who are unknowing,
unbiased and new.) All wanting is universal, and takes free¬
dom from the whole world. Hence if I can make the freedom
of the other a part of my own, it is clear that it has been taken
from the other. ( Tagebucb , pp. 300f.)

In Fichte s reflections too, the magnetopathic element of scan¬
dal immediately steps into the center: the devotion of the
passive part to the foreign will. Like the first magnetizers,
however, Fichte relied on the assumption that his teacher s will
was not the expression of egotistical feelings, but simply repro¬
duced pure and loyal emotions for what was presently evident.

What, then, does the teacher do? designs images,
combinations, and waits to be struck by self-evidence. [...]
he is guided by a law and force entirely unknown to him,
and to which he is connected as the listener to the teacher.

( Tagebuch , p. 301)

2547 B'jobtes

Admittedly, the teacher in Fichtes model, unlike the student,
must already have an ego that has been posited and elevated
to self-activity: he needs to have made himself freely as his
own product. At this level, completed self-production can be
reinterpreted as life from God that has been reached for or
reached through.

The student, by contrast, is direcdy aware of the teacher. His
immediate observation goes further and outwards. And how is
it with the correct devotion to the teacher? Answer: it is obser¬
vation of the same, as the principle of the images [...]. The
evidence then arises of its own accord. It is vital to have the
absolutely individual, to have attentiveness; but this is pure
devotion, a pure elimination of ones own activity. Therefore
here, as in the physical aspect of magnetism, an effect of the
individual on the outside and the central point of individuality
are given; and all this is a model for devotion and self-elimination
before God. ( Tagebuch , p. 302)

With Fichte, then, learning means subjecting oneself to a
magnetic thought treatment in the auditorium while in a state of
attentive ecstasy, just like Puysegur s somnambulists; exchanging
vulgar self-awareness for a lucid state of illumination in which
the ego conceives of itself as an organ of God. Teaching by
Fichtes method, however, would mean letting oneself go in
Gods service through free rhetorical-logical construction. The
speaker, an eloquent outpost of the absolute in the world of
phenomena, uses words as the ‘element of intellectual commu¬
nication”; for the free-moving speaker, the most complex
becomes the most simple again: “The word provokes certain

Humars in the Magic Circ e / 255

images in the state of devotion; the rest follows of its own
accord.” (Ibid.)

Thus Fichte’s speeches unfold, like an autogenic training in
enthusiasm, through what needs to be said: they tell of the
virtual presence of the divine kingdom of reason; a continuation
of Christianity by other, in Fichtes view, surely more perfect means.

Our idea-historical excursion into the two great formations of
depth-psychological discourses and practices before the twentieth
century, the intersubjective magic of the early Modern Age and the
world of animal magnetism, has brought to light three clearly
demarcated models of dyadic interpersonal union: magical rapture
in erotic reciprocal enchantment; the hypnotoid reproduction of
the mother-fetus relationship in magnetopathic treatment; the
ecstasy of selfless attentiveness in Fichtes rhetorical self-proofs of
God. Each of these configurations—lover-beloved, magnetizer-
magnetized, teacher-listener—can be described like the realization
of a temporarily closed bipolar bubble in which a single shared
subjectivity is spread resonantly between two partners. The transi¬
tion from the unenchanted to the enchanted, from the
individuated to the merged, and from the absent-minded to the
unconditionally listening state is achieved through different tech¬
niques respectively, however, and conveyed through diverse media;
in each case it depends on the ability of the passive side to give
itself up completely on its relationship with the active pole. Just as
love magic is conditioned by the object s readiness to yield to the
influence, mesmeric treatment likewise presupposes a patients
unbounded willingness to subordinate themselves to the doctors
fluid, while Fichtes psychagogic speeches, always suspended
between appeal and proof, fully engage the compliance of the

256 / Bubbles

intelligent ear for their developments. It goes without saying
that each of these procedures can only achieve success if it can
lay down its own terms. So where erotic magic, magnetism and
philosophical hypno-rhetoric are practiced, it is they them¬
selves that produce the magic circle in which alone they can
find their optimal state. Where the circles formation fails, the
effects become unstable—Fichtes reference to those listeners
who are merely curious, and otherwise inattentive and unwilling,
hints at a sound reason to be concerned about the desired
effects. A much more far-reaching disturbance of Mesmers
circles and effects was caused by the academic commission set
up by Louis XVI in 1784 to examine the scientific truth of
Mesmers theories and cures. The commissions negative report
profoundly shook Mesmer’s authority, and ultimately led him
to close his Paris practice. 26 As far as the erotomagical theories
of the early Modern Age are concerned, they were faced from
the start with an opponent—the Catholic Church—that could
place magic circles which had escaped their control under the
capital sentence of sorcery. For them, any psychogenic effects of
depth intimacy were potentially the result of demonic influ¬
ences or diabolical pacts; the central religious administration
aimed for a situation in which the church would only have to
deal with disciplined individuals easily controllable through
their dependency on Rome. Even as late as Schopenhauer, one
finds mention of a circular sent by the Roman Inquisition to
the bishops in 1856 in which they are called upon to join the
battle against the practice of animal magnetism. 27 Four hun¬
dred years after Ficinos impulse towards the erotology of the
Modern Age, it is still from the same intimacy-magical corner
that the Holy Office sees dangerous tendencies approaching.

Humans in the Mage Crete / 257

But the “magical” bi-personal bubbles are not only threat¬
ened by external disturbances; one occasionally finds motifs
entering the inside of the circle that necessarily lead to ruptures
from endogenous discrepancies. This became especially noticeable
in the reception history of animal magnetism, which proceeded
along two simultaneous paths from the outset: as a history of
trust and a history of distrust. In its entire first wave, animal
magnetism can be interpreted as a quarrel over the circle within
which the magnetopathic cures would achieve their successes.
Did it really have to be Newtons cosmic rays from the ether, as
Mesmer claimed, that formed a healing energy circle between
the magnetizer and the patient? Was it so indispensable to
venture the presumptuous hypothesis of a “universal gravita¬
tion” that also pervades the human world? Would it not be
sufficient for an explanation of all phenomena to assume that an
auratic circle of bodily vapors and animal warmth develops
between the healer and his subject? 28 Are the so-called crises
genuine crises that must precede any successful cure, or does it
not seem more justified to view them as pathological phenomena
in their own right? Should somnambulism and clairvoyance not
be understood as artificial illnesses only brought on by the treat¬
ment? And above all: can one fully rely on the moral integrity of
the magnetizers themselves? And is there not a danger that mag¬
netism, applied at the wrong time, does not cure the patient but
instead leaves mental scars that can be worse than the initial
complaints? These phantasms of suspicion, whose originators
usually entered the magic circle for a short time themselves so as
to flee better from it, were developed in a whole body of litera¬
ture, the most prominent examples being Edgar Allan Poes
short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1839) and

258/ Bubbles

mvmmiii

Jean-Jacqucs Paulec: Satire on Animal Magnetism, frontispiece from Anti-Magnetism ,
copperplate, 1784

Humans in tf»e Magic Circle / 259

Alfred Kubin, illustration for E. A. Poe’s The Facts in the Case ofM. Valdemar

E. T A. Hoffmanns “The Magnecizer” (1813). Poe’s macabre
tale documents the encroachment of magnetism on the occult
field—a tendency that had been evident in the Empire revival of
magnetism, but most of all its Russian and American reception.
The narrator tells of a macabre experiment, namely magnetizing
a dying man in articulo mortis : its success was keeping the mori¬
bund soul in a physically dead body for seven months. The
bound soul continued to speak to the living from its spirit hell,
before finally withdrawing completely at the attempt to awaken

260 1 Bubotes

the subject, leaving behind a corpse that dissolved in less than
a minute into a liquid mass of disgusting putrescence. For Poe,
unlike the majority of German natural theologians, the night
side of nature is no longer an allied darkness that brings safety
and salvation; his experiment means to show that the supposed
world of the womb can invert itself into a kingdom of hell. E.
T. A. Hoffmann, by contrast, reveals a moral night side in
nature’s night side: for who could prevent a shift within the
magnetic space from the exercise of medical power to a lust for
dictatorial political power? For Hoffmann the hero of his tale,
the magnetizer Alban, symbolizes, like a Napoleon of occult
forces, an unfettered will to power that cannot possibly con¬
tent itself simply with curing headaches and other minor
human ailments. The magnetopathic power no longer wants
to be a mere means, and makes itself the purpose of its exis¬
tence. Tt is in this spirit that Hoffmann lets his magnetizer
present the philosophical program for the nihilistic-vitalistic
age heralded by Napoleon:

All existence is struggle and is born of struggle. The more
powerful are granted victory in an ever-mounting climax, and
it grows in strength with every subdued vassal The striving
for that dominion is the striving for the divine, and the stronger
the feeling of power becomes, the more blissful it is. 29

Accordingly, Hoffmanns magnetizer will not let his victims go
once they are under his spell, and sooner kill them than accept
their freedom. This hints at the birth of modern psycho-sects from
the spirit of intimacy exploitation. They develop as therapeutic-
gurucratic parodies of the relationship between feudal lords and

Humans’ «n the Magic Circle / 261

vassals. The aesthetic counterpart revealed itself in the twentieth
century in Stefan Georges auratic totalitarianism, where the word
“circle” was made to represent as a sociological and spiritual
emblem. Here too, we find feudalism shifted to a different milieu
along with its entire metaphysics, psychology and spatial idea. In
his defense of the circle, Friedrich Gundolf announced the
following about the master:

The circle is his aura, and none of the members have or need
the pitiful ambition consciously to be a “personality” at all
costs, for their purpose is to be air and element [...]. The same
principle that makes the ruler the center of a living sphere, the
drive towards unity [*..] that same drive connects rulers and
servants in the spiritual realm [...]. 30

Phantasms of this kind prove that the formal motif of the magic
circle cannot be restricted to the intimate therapeutic encounter;
it is capable of extending itself from the closeness-psychological
biune figure to the group- and mass-psychological spell formula.
Occasionally it expands from the fluidal union between the
healer and the patient to a whirlwind of suction in the revolu¬
tionary collective of intoxication, where fortune-seekers dragged
along and enchanted employees assist in the staging of their cata¬
strophe to the point of self-annihilation. We will show later on, in
the second book, especially in the description of the transition of
the bipersonal bubble form to the political orb form, how pro¬
jection onto the large scale takes place and which emotional
errors of format and category appear when uterine relationships
and their crises are reenacted in sociodramas.

.262/Bubbles

Excursus 1

Thought Transmission

To speak means to play with the body of the other.

— Alfred Tomatis

That my thoughts are invisible for others; that my head is a safe,
full of notions and dreams that rest locked within me; that my
reflections form a book which no one can read from the outside;
that my ideas and knowledge belong exclusively to me, transparent
for myself and impenetrable for others—to such an extent that
even torture may not induce me to tell others what I know
against my will: one cannot overestimate the significance which
this syndrome of notions about the concealed nature of thoughts
in the thinking subject has taken on in the recent history of
private semblance. This perhaps makes it seem an even more
provocative imposition to consider that precisely these notions
have played a part in creating that semblance in the first place. In
our cultural area they are only a little more than two and a half
thousand years old—for a macro-historian, merely the young
fluff on sturdy layers of older psychological realities. If they were
not the dominant ideas today, they would hardly be of significance

263

for the gravity of human history. For during the majority of the
evolutionary process, almost everything individual humans
thought and felt was so transparent that for the others around
them, those experiences were like their own. The notion of
private ideas had no grounding in emotional experience or the
social concept of space: no cells had been made for individuals
yet, either in the imagination or the physical architectures of
societies. In small groups, under the law of reciprocity, the
actions of one are the actions of the other; hence the thoughts of
the one are generally also the thoughts of the other. This even
applies to archaic “shame cultures,” where individuals would like
to make their inner selves invisible because they suffer from the
excessive exposure of their affects to the empathy of the others,
From a paleo-psychological perspective, hidden thoughts are
perfectly absurd. The notion of a private interior in which the
subject can close the door behind it, reflect upon and express
itself was unknown before the early individualistic turn in
antiquity; its propagandists were the men known as sages or
philosophers—forerunners of the modern intellectual and post-
modern singles. It was they who first gave the motif that true
thought was only possible as independent thought, as thinking
differently from the stupid masses, its revolutionary virulence.
The meanwhile widespread model of the retreat within ones own
mind is derived from those impulses: thoughts are free, no one
can guess them 31 —initially, that only means that the thinkers of
new thoughts become inscrutable for the guardians of conven¬
tional thoughts. In the world of new thoughts, the axiom that
the thoughts of one are also those of the other in fact loses its
validity: I cannot possibly detect in others a thought I have not
had myself. In differentiated societies, other people frequently

264 / Buofei

have different thoughts in their heads. In such societies, it is the
psychotherapist’s task to ensure that individuals do not drift off
too far into the pathogenic otherness and ownness of their
thoughts and feelings. The fact that thoughts were more like
public matters in the old sociosphere was due first of all to a
media-physiological factor: human brains, like genitalia, are
fundamentally paired, probably even gregarious systems. While
the statement “My belly belongs to me” can have a definable
meaning in polemical contexts—namely that it should be the
mother who has the last word in questions of abortion—the
declaration “My brain belongs to me” would be both morally
unacceptable and objectively inappropriate. It could neither
truthfully mean that I am the author and owner of my thoughts
nor that I am completely exempt from sharing them with others;
and the claim that I can think whatever I want is also imma-
nently untenable. A cerebral individualism would miss the fact
that a brain only awakens to a certain level of performance
through interaction with a second, and beyond that with a
larger brain ensemble—no one would dare speak of optimal
performance. Brains are media for what other brains do and have
done. Intelligence only receives the key stimuli for its own
activity from other intelligence. Like language and emotion,
intelligence is not a subject, but a milieu or resonance circle.
Preliterate intelligence, unlike literate intelligence, which is
capable of abstraction, is oriented towards a dense climate of
participation because, being entirely embedded in close-range
communications, it requires the experience of a presentist brain
and nerve communism for its development. In the age of reading,
this would change into the quasi-telepathic republic of scholars,
which does not have its Zeitgeists for nothing; thanks to writing,

Though: Trensmiseo*™' 265

the spirits of the distant past can return in current manifestations
of attentiveness. It is also writing that enables individuals to
withdraw from society in order to complete themselves with
authorial voices: whoever can read can also be alone. Only with
the advent of literacy did anachoresis become possible; the book
and the desert belong together. Even in the loneliest retreat,
however, it is impossible to have last instance thoughts of ones
own. It is precisely through the withdrawal into the socially
empty space that the idea of God as the first mind reader became
dominant; by retreating to the desert, I necessarily draw Gods
attention to myself And it was onto the God of the hermits that
residues of the intimate participatory function in early groups
were transferred: He guaranteed that the ascetic in the desert
would never be without his great companion, who encloses him,
observes him, eavesdrops on him and sees through him.

It was only writing that broke open the magic circles of
orality and emancipated the readers from the totalitarianism of
the current, locally spoken word; writing and reading, especially
in their Greek, democratic, autodidactic modes of application,
offered practice in non-emotion. In truth, the oral age was
synonymous with the magical-manipulative prehistory of the
soul, as the presentist obsession with the voices and suggestions
of clan members was the norm then. Of course, an obsession
with the normal, average and present is not conspicuous as such:
in families, villages and neighborhoods it is considered the
simple, direct, natural mode of communication. This keeps quiet
the fact that in the oral world, all people are magicians who cast
a varyingly powerful spell of normalization on one another
(which can usually only be broken through a counter-spell, such
as travels or conversations with strangers).

266 / Bubble

After the Neolithic revolution, the primary presence-magical
potential was overlaid with the web of absence magics, then later
also that of writing magics; it was only with these that what we
today call the true magical functions were fulfilled, namely
magic from the distance and communication with the dead.
These spells bring to the fore those deceased god-kings and gods
who have afflicted and perverted human intelligence since then;
they have kept world history in motion as a series of wars
between telepathic and influence-psychotic possession groups,
better known under the name “cultures” The presence-magical
conviviality of the oldest cultures depended on the neurolin¬
guistic and neurosensitive domain: dense parallel programmings
of the brain ensembles enabled the members of groups to func¬
tion in great interpersonal proximity and intimate conductivity.
That humans are capable of such densely mutually intervening
participations is part of their oldest clan-historical makeup.
Though this receded into the background in the medial Modem
Age, that is to say the age of writing, it was never entirely
eliminated. It seems plausible to suppose that the innumerable
accounts of “thought transmissions” during magnetopathic
treatments are based on a reactivation of preliterate and pre¬
verbal proximity functions. This also includes episodes of pain
transmission from the patient to the healer—Fichte cites a
French source describing such a case in his journal on animal
magnetism. 32 That patients often seem to “read” the thoughts of
their therapists, and the therapists somehow photograph the
former s inner material, so to speak, in their “own” feelings and
associations before bringing it back into the conversation with
the patient—this has been one of the basic observations in the
new practice of closeness since the founding days of modern

T~ou.ght T'arismssion / 267

psychology. Like William James and Pierre Janet, Sigmund
Freud was impressed by the obstinate reality of “tele”pathic
effects; he had no doubts that paleo-psychological functions are
reactivated in them. But Freud hesitated to make any loud
proclamations, and with good reason: he knew that it would
have been ruinous for the psychoanalytical movement if he had
led it into a cultural battle between occult-archaic and modern-
enlightened models of communication. He was aware that
psychoanalysis only had a chance as a specifically modern cul¬
tivation of closeness relationships in an alliance with
enlightenment. It was in the nature of the matter that the ana¬
lytical contours, as earlier in mesmerism, had to display those
preverbal participatory effects that had been deformed into
bizarre secrets under the semblance of individualism. But we can
now better understand why they immediately returned as nor¬
mal phenomena upon the first possible restoration of
pre-individualistic situations of closeness. 33 In this respect too,
the continuum between mesmerism and psychoanalysis is
unmistakable. But as long as “thought transmission” has the
reputation of an extra-normal phenomenon (while affective and
scenic transmission would constitute psychological normality),
it must be perceived as a fascinating curiosity, and as such drawn
into the dynamics of the desire for enchantment and the pathos
of disenchantment. Where these forces push their way to the
foreground, there is no prospect that the critique of participatory
reason, which describes the play of inter-intelligence on its own
terms, might consolidate itself. 34

268 / SubQles

CHAPTER 4

The Retreat Within the Mother
Groundwork for a Negative Gynecology

Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for not showing her
grounds? Perhaps her name is—to speak Greek—Baubo?

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Just as, in the time of Caesars and popes, all roads led to Rome,
where heaven and earth are supposedly closer together than else¬
where, all fundamental reflections during the discourse of origin
were drawn towards the vulva—the magical gate where the
uterine darkness of the inner world borders the public, illumi¬
nated and sayable domain. The reason for this vulva magic is the
elementary idea that the mother gate, which by its nature serves
as an exit, and only as such, must also be employed as an
entrance—less in a sexual-erotic, and hence partial act, than in
a religious, existentially encompassing sense. In fact, tendencies
towards a two-way traffic before the female opening, and
through it, can be identified from Paleolithic cave cults onwards.
Whether the archeological discoveries made so far genuinely
testify to formal Paleolithic magics of rebirth—that is, proto¬
religious cults—may still be uncertain. 1 It is undeniable,

269

however, that there was a precise historical heyday for increased
religious interest in the vulva. The massive crowd before the
passage to the female interior can be culture-historically dated:
it was only after the notorious Neolithic revolution that the
fascination with the womb could develop into a world power.
Only then, in the great Neolithic change, did those circum¬
stances emerge that brought territorialism upon humanity; only
then did the earthbound identities begin to blossom; only then
were humans compelled to identify themselves by their place,
their adhesion to territory, and finally their property. The
Neolithic revolution lured the previously nomadic human
groups into the trap of sedentarism, in which they attempted to
prove themselves by simultaneously experimenting with rooted¬
ness and escape; thus begins the agro-metaphysical conversation
with useful plants, pets, household spirits and the gods of the
fields and meadows. It was only the early agricultural fixation
on the soil that forced the epochal equation of the mother
world and cultivated, fertile space. The age of work as mother-
management begins with the settling of the earth, the “pig
earth 55 (John Berger), which from now on must chronically
bring forth additional produce, additional births, and a surplus
of power. This age sees the internalized bond of mortals to a
sacred-accursed and contaminated territory with huts, sewers
and headquarters: where for generations, the fields need to be
cultivated year after year, where stores make projects possible
and dead ancestors measure out their grounds of return, two
things form: a new spatial type, home, and a new thought
type, land law— nomos. 2 The Neolithic equation of mother
and cultivated earth led to the ten-thousand-year conservative
revolution, which forms the substrate of the early settled cultures,

270 / Bubbles

archaic states and regional advanced civilizations. It was scarcely
half a century ago that the European faction of humanity ini¬
tiated a counter-revolution of mobility which restored the
utero-fugal forces to predominance over the almost immemorial
womb fixation of agro-metaphysical times.

The dual possession by the soil and genealogical compul¬
sion drove the settled peoples into the arms of the possessing
Great Mothers. As the soil binds the living and the dead to
itself equally some start to believe that the mothers want to
keep their loved ones forever with them, and in a sense also
within them. Now the hearth and the landscape, the womb and
the field, become synonymous. In what resembled a first expe¬
rience of fates power, the settled populations in the early
villages and towns are confronted by the necessity to identify
themselves through terms of lineage. Before the state became
fate, fate actually meant relation to territorialized dead. Just as
fate means the inaccessible force of retribution, relation means
the regulated connection of the elder to the younger, and of the
elder to their soil-rooted ancestors. In early settlements, where
being [Setn] consistently meant being related and existence
[Dasein] meant being descended from, people had to learn to
say which womb they came from and in what relation they
stood to their mothers and soils. It is through this, the greatest
transformation of thought forms in the old world, that the
Paleolithic religiosity of birth and life began to move towards
the Neolithic, already para-metaphysically shimmering reli¬
giosity of power and death. 3 With the shift to the genealogical
compulsion of reason and allocation, the female womb, together
with its portal and its hallway, is subjected to an incalculable
alteration of meaning: from now on, it is no longer simply the

The Retreat Within the Mother / 271

Funerary papyrus of the priest Khonsu-Mes; the northern and southern Nut
ensure die regeneration of the earth s shell by pouring the water of life on it.

starting point for all paths in the world, but also becomes a
term for the great homeward journeys that must be undertaken
for the sake of the now urgent search for ancestors, the interro¬
gation of the dead and rebirth—in short, for the sake of
self-identification. For the restless living, the womb becomes a
place of truth; it imposes itself upon their thoughts and wishes
as the most intimate Yonder with which mortals have any busi¬
ness; what awaits them there will never be any less than insight
into their true selves. The womb idea exudes the evidence that
truth has a secret seat which can be reached through initiations
and ritual modes of approach. Hence by the end of the age of
uterine compulsion, when the first enlightenment was surfacing
in the etiological philosophies of the Greeks, people would

272 / Bubbles

Scenes from the embalming process show the correspondence between bathing the
corpse in caustic soda and pouring over the water of life.

descend to the mothers in order to find among them, and within
them, something they would later refer to without the slightest
blush as “knowledge.” The self of this knowledge is concerned
to plant itself in the most powerful interior; all trees of wisdom
point down into the womans interior. Mortals, those who are
born, have their beginning and their end in caves of origin.
One day people will even call for the entire horizon to become
cave-immanent, and the phenomenal world will then have to
become interpretable as an interior landscape. Not without
reason did cultures of that proto-metaphysical epoch—primarily
Babylonians and Egyptians—imagine the visible world as being
enclosed by great rings of water: where the mother motivates

The Rei^at Wir r the Mcrrer / 273

The gabled facade of the Lomas Rishi Cave in India, 3rd century BC, vulva-shaped
cave entrance

rhought, everything is inside. As long as motherhood and
gestation define the form of thought as such, there is no
longer meant to be any outside; for those who know, the only
concern is to learn in what sense these mysteries of all-imma¬
nence apply. Whoever wishes to discover who they truly are
under such conditions must, at least once in their life, travel
to the source that is the only place from which grown life can

274 / Bubbles

understand itself. Once the female birth organ is no longer
simply the exit, real and imaginary, but has also become an
entrance through which the search for identity must pass, it
charges itself up with ambivalent fascinations. The bleeding
gate to life, whose gaping fascinates, outrages and repels, 4 now
becomes a doorway to the lower and upper worlds. The uterus
expands into the beyond, to which the vulva becomes the hor¬
rifying and inviting portal. It is now what Heidegger calls the
inevitable. In the oldest world, being reasonable meant, first
and foremost, acknowledging one thing: whoever passes
through the gate inwards must part with his previous life—
whether in a symbolic death, as ritualized for initiations, or
through the real thing. Both deaths seem surmountable in the
faith that dying, if the standard procedure is followed, very
much aids a return to the mother interior. All truth-seekers in
metaphysical times are therefore returnees to the womb. They
strive for what seems prima facie unattainable: they wish to tie
the end of the search to the beginning of life and reverse birth
through radical struggles against themselves. Who is the hero
with a thousand faces if not the seeker who journeys out into the
wide world in order to return home to his ownmost cave? The
tales of heroic truth-seekers celebrate the womb-immanence of
all being. Wisdom is the realization that even the open world is
encompassed by the cave of all caves. Because knowledge always
leads home, and thus revokes birth or reveals its meaning in the
first place, the heroic returnees must fight the dragon at the
entrance to the maternal portal one more time; now it is a
matter of repeating the struggle of birth in the opposite direc¬
tion. If this fight is won, the insight into life before life,
prenatal death, enables the striving for illumination to come

The Retreat VVIthih the Mother / 275

into itself—and this illumination naturally causes total dark¬
ening. Increasingly, ordinary dying also takes on associations
of return. Thus one not only finds an epidemic spread of re-
fetalizing burial rites after the Neolithic shift; one could speak
of a fetalization of worldviews as a whole. The equation of the
grave and the womb—the mysterious and evident spatial
premise of all early metaphysical systems, which know only
immanence—begins its long reign over the imaginary realm
of the post-Neolithic human world; it would cast its spell on
the thought and life of early cultures for no less than two
hundred generations.

It was only the ancient metaphysical systems of light and
heaven that ended the wombs monopoly of the discourse of
origin, by granting a share of the origin function to the male as
the “transcendent.” From then on, the great homecoming also
takes on aspects of yearning for the divine paternal home; for
millennia, Christianity developed the attraction of the idea of
the paternal womb. It is only from the start of the recent Euro¬
pean Modern Age that one can speak of humans breaking in
significant numbers from the forms of life and thought that
carried further—directly or indirectly—the suckling magic of
the ontologies of maternal immanence. Only a few generations
ago did philosophical stances emerge that no longer required
their adepts to renounce their selves and, in a certain sense, die
in order to enter the inner circle of truth; as late as 1810, the
Nuremberg headmaster Hegel still deemed it fitting to tell mid¬
dle school students that, like initiates of ancient mystery cults,
their senses would have to reel before they could progress to
real thought. Up until Romanticism, death was always viewed
by the metaphysically resolute as a fair price for the privilege of

276 / Bubbles

returning to the place of truth as an isolated being. The price
of transfiguration, on the other hand, was already negotiable
early on. Death was not the only currency in which the fee for
access to the concealed mystery of being could be paid; the
Empedoclean leap into the crater was not the only form of
admittance sacrifice. Often genital sacrifices also made in
exchange for being close to the great maternal interior—the
castrated priests of the Greek fertility goddess Cybele enjoyed
the privilege of uniting with the goddess inside the earths inte¬
rior in hieros gamos . The institution of eunuch priesthood was
as well known in the cult of the Roman and Phrygian magna
mater as in that of the Anatolian Artemis and the Syrian god¬
dess of Hierapolis, and also in the Indian cults of the Great
Mother, in which tens of thousands of young men in every
generation are still persuaded or forced to perform genital
sacrifices to this day. Furthermore, there is much to suggest
that the majority of Western philosophies were typological
relatives of the holy eunuchs, for only those who understand
the principle of all-immanence in its strict form could see fulfill¬
ment in absorption by the One. The secret of the highest
metaphysics—what was it based on if not logical incest? 5

The early para-metaphysicians grappled insistently, bloodily
and ascetically with the original imbalance: being bom and yet
wanting to progress “into truth” 6 —something that is doomed
to fail under human conditions, unless one could find a way of
revoking birth and invalidating separation. How other than
through self-dissolution can the bom regain the position of the
unborn? Post-Neolithic humanity devised a thousand and
three methods to court the impossible. Whatever it achieved
or gambled away in the process was always based on the same

Toe Retreat Within the Mother / 277

Votive to a mother deity, presumably from a shrine in Veii, Southern Italy, terracotta

278 / Bubclss

paradoxical intertwining of forwards and backwards. The one
unmistakable truth is that the return to the mother constitutes
the open secret about the secrets of the old world. 7 Death must
therefore become the royal road of knowledge—provided one
manages to discover a way of dying that can be experienced as
regress rather than annihilation. No admittance to substance
without re-fetalization. Where the great mothers still have the
monopoly on thought, the civil war between philosophical rea¬
son and common sense, the fundamental cognitive event in
advanced civilization, has not yet begun in earnest. For millen¬
nia, the wise and the profane gazed with the same fascinated
eyes into the wombs of the encompassing mothers. In the
ancient uteromorphic funerary urns of the Greeks, the pithoi ,
which later became significant as wine vessels in the Dionysia,
the para-metaphysical equation of maternal womb and burial
ground is palpable; they preserve the dead in a fetal squat. The
custom of burial in uteromorphic vessels predates Greek cul¬
ture, and there are numerous indications of its existence among
Bronze Age Aegean cults. It appears to have originated from
Asia Minor; analogous practices in South America suggest its
growth from related constellations of elemental ideas. In Egypt,
the noble dead had the image of the sky goddess Nut, the re¬
bearer, painted on the floors or lids of their sarcophagi. It is
above all in the varied forms of earth burial, however, that the
central idea of the reintegration of mortals into the womb of
the Great Mother is especially prominent. Even Indian crema¬
tions do not lack a connection to the inescapable womb-grave
equation, in that they stage transformations in which the exit
from one form prepares the entrance into another—a change
that cannot take place anywhere except in the inner space

The Retreat VWiin ine Mother / 279

The Egyptian sky goddess Nut

beyond all forms, namely that of the world mother. It is not
only the post-Neolithic burial habits that came under the sign
of the Great Mother, however. In most settled peoples of that
time, inventions of worldviews were dominated entirely by
utero-mythological motifs—their main symbols are earth and
house, field and digging stick, birth and seed, harvest and
underworld, sea and boat, cave and egg. 8

There is no doubt: on our phenomenological expedition
through the formal sequence of bipolar closeness and intimacy
spheres, we have now passed the threshold to the narrower cen¬
ter of gravitation and gravidity. From here on, intimacy means
proximity to the barrier which seals off the inside of the mother
from the public world. If a confrontation occurs between the
eye and the wombs entrance—recall Hindu sculptures at cave

280 / Bubbles

entrances in the shape of the yoni-vulva—the examination of
the field of intimacy enters its critical phase. This is where it
transpires whether subject and object separate in the sense of
the classical knowledge relation, or whether the subject enters
the object to such an extent that the latter gives up its object
character, indeed its presence and capacity for oppositeness as
such. On the second of these paths, a bizarre epistemological
affair develops between the vulva and its observer that will put
an end to all externality and concreteness. In its own precarious
way, the vulva belongs to those ungiven objects—Thomas
Macho calls them “nobjccts”—that we shall discuss directly
here, and indirectly in all subsequent chapters. At the “sight” of
them, the observer can be sucked in or de-positioned—up to a
point where there is no longer anything concretely present

The Reiratff Wirr the Mother / 281

before him. He only sees the womans thing as long as he stays
before it as a frontal observer. If he chose this as his final position,
he would not be a seeker in the sense of a para-metaphysical
striving to contemplate the basis of things, but an observer, a
voyeur, a neutralist, a scientist—for example a gynecologist,
who studies the female genital system unimpressed by all effec¬
tive metaphors of homecoming. At most, he could provide—as
Hans Peter Duerr demonstrates in his book Intimitdt [Intima¬
cy]—a baroque ethno-hisrory of vulva-related ideas, practices
and affects in different cultures . 9 With this relatively young
cognitive attitude, it is possible to treat the vulva, as an anatomical
or ethnographic object, descriptively and operatively without
motivational derivatives of the post-Neolithic pushing and
pulling behavior at the cave entrance coming into play. What

282 / Bubbles

sets positive gynecology—essentially a product of Aristotelian
thoughts and its continuation in the neo-European life sci¬
ences—apart from older traditional wisdom is that it can stand
fast before the once so magical female and maternal portal in an
objectifying, and thus emancipating, certainty of distance.
Where the investigative eye penetrates deeper, it simply pro¬
duces additional surface views of levels situated further inside:
uteroscopy is simply the continuation of vulvoscopy by tech-
nicaJ means. One could call the organ image gained through
this view a vulvogram. Where this is made proficiently using
the imaging procedures available, the observer is not given any
reason whatsoever to doubt his impartial eyesight. The visibility
of the vulva as a facing object ensures that the observer is not
absorbed by it. Seeing here means having the calm freedom to
attain, in accordance with the axioms of the Greek epistemes
and at the necessary distance from things, a dispository knowledge
of them. It is quite different with the old para-metaphysical
reverence before the gate to the inner world of the mother.
Whoever believes in ritual acts of approach that they are
standing before this entrance of all entrances, or envisages it in
symbolic imagination, is immediately affected by a suction that
is meant to make the beholders senses reel. Where the real
Baubo—Nietzsches crown witness to a theory of truth made
discreet once more—comes into view, seeing itself has little
future. The seekers eye here wants to, and must, be broken by
its object. The pupils dilate before the sucking portal. As he
comes closer, the beholder will feel as if a powerless warning
legend had just glided past him: the last object before the great
attainment of knowledge! And in reality, as soon as the entrants
had passed through the grotto grate, they would encounter the

Retreat Within the Mother / 283

Udder-shaped bronze cauldron (li) from rhe early Shang Dynasty, c. 16th ro 15ch
century BC, used for the preparation of sacrificial dishes

tropical night; and the fall of this exquisite night would mark
the end of everything based on clearing, distance and concrete¬
ness. From now on, asking about the intimate has its price for
the analytical intelligence too.

In the following, we shall weave the fiction that we are able to
split our adventurous intelligence in such a way that one half of

2Q4 / Bubbles

Fata horn erica. Etching from J.-J. Boissard, Embimntum liber 1588. Even if it is the
patriarch Zeus distributing the Jots of fate, the lottery jars still constitute a form of hyper¬
uterus. Whatever the nature of life, its form remains indebted to womb immanence.

ir takes up position at the entry ramp to the mystical cave—still
viewing it from the outside, that is—while the other half is ini¬
tiated to enter the homogeneous totality of darkness. The two
halves should remain in contact during the excursion—the one
inside by reporting its states in the objectless sphere to the out¬
side, and the one waiting ante portas by sending suggestions for
the verbalization of the indescribable into the cave. This split
arrangement takes into account that the focus of our investiga¬
tion does not He in the aim to produce mystical experience here
and now, but rather in the project of advancing a theory of
dyadic intimacy to the point where speaking theory has nor¬
mally turned into silent theory. The all-too-familiar
phenomenon of mystical muteness is due here to the fact that
because of the observer s coalescence with the most intimate

T he Retreat W thin re Mother / 285

sphere, the bipolar structure of cognition and relation fades in
his perception. Once the point of being-inside has been
reached, all language games of observing and. facing must
indeed come to an end. A critical theory of being-in-the-cave
only becomes possible through the introduction of a third ele¬
ment—in our case that means the doubling of the cave
explorer, with one going bravely ahead and the other cautiously
staying behind. This leads to a division of labor between
yearning and skepticism, fusion and reserve. This arrangement
involves conceding to the mystical tradition that the one inside
will, indeed, inevitably repeat the insurmountable cave truth:
that here, the One is everything. Someone who were truly all
the way inside could only affirm the basic monistic doctrines of
the last millennia, which the mystically interested from all areas
so like to say are the same in all cultures. The observing partial
intelligence at the cave entrance, on the other hand, here in the
role of the participating third party, insists that whatever things
the experimental mystic experiences in the cave can only be
aspects of the dyad. If the pioneer claims to have found unim¬
paired unity within, one can tell him outright about the biune
nature of his situation. In this manner, the union-mystical sem¬
blance to which the coalesced witness is exposed in the cave can
be simultaneously respected and dethroned: interest in the
progress of the dual theory is satisfied without having to deny
the insights of mystical monism. Then the acute appearance of
unity without a second element as a form of consciousness can
even be understood as the most revealing figure of the bipolar-
spheric coalescence taking place in actu . The reality of the
relationship between the mother and the unborn includes, in a
certain sense, the inexistence of this relationship as such for the

266/Bubbles

Lasciate ognipensiet'o o voi qu inti'dte: mouth of hell in die “Holy Forest” of Bomarzo,
1550-1580

child. As long as it is living inside the mother, it in fact floats
in a sort of non-duality; in the perception, its containedness in
the “mother** is confirmed by the termination of that connec¬
tion as an acute proof of the given fusion. Whoever experiences
the scene is either primarily or secondarily an infans , that is to
say a fetus or a mystic, significantly speechless in both positions
and with no connection to a facing opposite. The relation itself
only exists in moments when it has to be denied or de-thema-
tized. Part of the reality of this singular relationship is that
where it exists, it precisely does not exist for the one contained:
for the fetus there is no counterpart to which it might be inter-
personally or inter-objecrively related; there is nothing else to
confirm its real being-in. The same applies by analogy to the
mystic; in proximity to the actually present nobject, the subject

Tre Retreal Wthin Mother / 287

too is disarmed and dissolved. Taking up Thomas Machos
observations on the logic of basic psychoanalytical principles,
we will examine this logical oddity—that one class of closeness
relationships with the other is only real if these are denied or
erased as relationships—more closely in the following.

The Retreat Within -he Mother / 289

Excursus 2

Nobjects and Un-Relationships

On the Revision of Psychoanalytical
Stage Theory

It is one of the publicized secrets of early Viennese psycho¬
analysis that it stopped halfway in its penetration of the
intersubjective world of closeness, both in its therapeutic
arrangement and its conceptual instruments. People were able
to say—and rightly, for the most part—that it developed in
theory and practice a system to fend off the unwelcome expe¬
riences of closeness that it inevitably brought about through
its arrangement. Freuds obstinate scientism has often been
the object of justified critique in recent decades—partly from
a science-theoretical perspective, by proving that Viennese
analysis described its own theoretical status incorrectly and
sought to force a scenic-hermeneutical, language-theoretical
and experience-scientific discipline into the mold of the
natural sciences; and partly in psychodynamic terms, by
attempting to show with what maneuvers and from what
compulsive motives—mostly of matriphobic origin—the
founder of Viennese psychoanalysis evaded the more disturbing
deep layers in the field of intimate relationships he had newly
described. All these points of criticism managed to remain
immanent to the elastic approach of the Freudian model,

291

however, and to be integrated sometimes more, sometimes
less willingly by a psychoanalytical movement that was pre¬
pared to learn.

A substantially more radical critique, however, developed
on a front whose development neither the immanent nor the
external critics of psychoanalysis had reckoned with. It
emerged from the combination of recent prenatal research and
the conceptual rearrangements of the newer media philoso¬
phies. Against this background, the cultural philosopher and
media anthropologist Thomas Macho has conclusively
revealed a fundamental construction error in psychoanalytical
terminology with reference to archaic and prenatal mother-child
relationships . 10 It can indeed be shown that psychoanalytical
notions of early communications are consistently formulated
according to the model of object relationships—especially in
the concepts of what is termed “developmental stage theory,”
in which one organ is bound as a subject precursor to an ele¬
ment from the outside world as the object pole: in the oral
phase the mouth and the breast; in the anal phase the anus
and its product, feces; in the genital phase the penis and the
mother, as an object of love sans phrase. It is well known that
Freud placed the fateful necessity of this third phase above
everything else, because he was convinced that genuine indi¬
viduation takes place as a development of sexual subjectivity
in the resolution of the triangular Oedipal conflict. This,
according to orthodox doctrine, marks the attainment of psy¬
chological object maturity, which is prefigured from the first
time the child reaches for the mothers breast as a culturally
binding and organically plausible goal of development.
Macho, by contrast, has shown that the entire psychoanalytical

292 / Bubbles

terminology for early relationships is fundamentally deformed
by the object prejudice—and beyond this, that the fixation on
thinking in object relationships is responsible for the almost
grotesque misunderstanding of fetal and infantile modes of
reality in early psychoanalytical orthodoxy. It would then be a
futile, not to say pathogenic undertaking to attempt a
description of the early mother-child reality in terms of object
relationships, as there are not yet any traces of subject- or
object-like aspects in the actual situation. Only an elaborated
theory of psychosomatic mediality could, one day, be capable
of representing the intimate webs of the earliest dyads in a
correspondingly finely woven language of reciprocal solubility
and suspension in a bipolar ether of relationships. This would
presuppose a replacement on all levels of psychological orga¬
nization of the previous, eccentric and occasionally even
dangerously disinformative descriptions of object relation¬
ships by medial analyses. Only through medial formulations
can the mode of being in the child's earliest presentist
encounters be adequately expressed in language. What is
more, one must assume at least three pre-oral stages and forms
of condition before the supposedly primary oral phase, each
of which, in its own particular way and according to the
nature of its elements, can itself already be viewed as a regime
of radical mediality.

1. First of all one must conceive a phase of fetal cohabi¬
tation in which the incipient child experiences the sensory
presence of liquids, soft bodies and cave boundaries: most
importantly placental blood, then the amniotic fluid, the
placenta, the umbilical cord, the amniotic sac and a vague pre¬
figuring of the experience of spatial boundaries through the

Nobjects and Un-Rea: onsnos/ 293

resistance of the abdominal wall and elastic walling-in. A fore¬
taste of what will later be called reality presents itself in the
form of an intermediate fluidal realm that lies embedded in a
dark, spheric spatial factor softly cushioned within firmer
boundaries. If there were already early “objects” in this field,
their state could only ever be that of object shadows or things
of emergence—contents of a first Yonder from which a first
Here conceives itself, both combined in a vaguely contoured
encompassing space with an increasing tendency towards
tightness. Possible candidates for such object shadows are pri¬
marily the umbilical cord—which may be sensed by touch
early on—and the placenta, which, like a nurturing primal
companion to the fetus, has an early diffuse presence as the
harbinger of a first counterpart. (The two following chapters
deal with the “relationship” between the fetus/subject and the
placenta/companion.) Objects that, like those we have named,
are not objects because they have no subject-like counterpart,
are referred to by Macho as “nobjects”; they are spherically
surrounding mini-conditions envisaged by a non-facing self,
namely the fetal pre-subject, in the mode of non-confronta-
tional presence as original creatures of closeness in the literal
sense. Their being-close-to-here (which is precisely not yet a
demonstrable being-there) communicates itself to the child
most of all with its first gift, the placental blood. Among the
nobjects of the earliest world of “experience,” placental blood
has the incontestable status of the earliest. Consequently one
must assume, as the most original of the pre-oral regimes, a
suspended stage whose essential content lies in the constant
placenta-mediated exchange of blood between mother and
child. The blood, which is not only the blood of the one, but

294 /Bubbles

automatically also creates the first medial “bond” between the
dyadic partners interlocked in bipolar intimacy. Through the
bloody the biunity is constituted as a trinitary unity from the
start; the third element turns two into one. It is not for nothing
that many cultures describe the closest form of connection
between relatives as a blood relation; in the everyday sense this
refers to the imaginary blood of family trees, but at a deeper
level also implies a real blood communion: with its character¬
ization as a network of “relatives,” the archaic circulatory
community is elevated to a symbolic representation. For the
ancient Egyptians, it was the mothers blood that nourished
the fetus by flowing down from her heart. In medieval Europe,
and even into the eighteenth century, it was widely believed
that unborn children survived by drinking the mother s men¬
strual blood. 11 In reality, the fetal modus vivendi can be
described as a fluidal communion in the medium of blood. It
lives on in all postnatally transformed fluid cultures—from
drinks to baths, ablutions and aspersions. The new media-
theoretical version of the intimacy motif makes it clear why
blood is indeed a very special juice: it is the first material
between two individuals who will one day—when they become
modern people—speak on the telephone. From the start, the
history of the self is first of all a history of self-conveyance. Its
protagonists are beings who come from respectively unique
circulatory communities and drinks communions—and who
keep reviving that uniqueness in ever different translations. It
is these fluidal communards that Rilke addresses in his appeal
to lovers from the second Duino Elegy: “When you raise lips to
the lips of the other, drinking each other / ...strange, how
those drinkers depart from it all.” It would scarcely do justice to

Nobjects and U- -Reiatoshlps / 295

the medium of blood, however, if one sought to interpret it as
the carrier of a prenatal “dialogue” between mother and fetus;
obstinate fixations on verbal communication have seduced
many analysts into using the misleading term “dialogue” to
describe medial exchange in the archaic dyad, and even the great
psychologist Rene A. Spitz showed a lack of the necessary acu¬
men in tolerating a media-theoretical absurdity in the title of his
well-known book Vom Dialog [On Dialogue]. 12

2. The second aspect of the pre-oral media field concerns
the psychoacoustic initiation of the fetus into the uterine
sound world. It is logical that acoustic events can only be given
in the nobject mode—for sonorous presences have no tangible
substrate that could be encountered in the attitude of standing
opposite something. From the physiology of listening as a state
of being set in sympathetic vibration, it is evident that acoustic
experiences are media processes which cannot possibly be rep¬
resented in languages of object relationships. This applies,
incidentally, to the position of open air listening as much as to
the fetal position, which is why music is the continuum art par
excellence; listening to music always means being-in-music, 13
and in this sense Thomas Mann was right to call music a
demonic realm—when listening, one is genuinely possessed by
sound at that moment. (As far as the formation of intimacy
through fetal acoustics is concerned—especially as discussed in
the extensive research of Alfred A. Tomatis—we will examine
this in Chapter 7 below. It is not least the medial character of
the amniotic fluid, which transforms sound waves into vibra¬
tions of auditory and full bodily relevance, that becomes
apparent in the light of this research; but the transmission of
sound through bone seems even more significant.) Macho, for

26© / Bubbles

his part, places less emphasis on the fetal bonding through the
mother's voice than on the immediate postnatal self-experience
of the newborn in the use of its own voice, which secures the
connection to the mother outside the bodily enclosure as a
vocal-magical medium. As a form of acoustic umbilical cord,
it offers a replacement for the lost actual umbilical connection;
Macho emphasizes that this coming together through listening
in the extra-uterine dyad remains the nucleus of all communal
formations, and that connection to others through acoustic
umbilical cords is the central principle of psychosocial synthe¬
sis. 14 At the same time, a pre-oral, medial ego core develops in
the child when it hears its own voice; the incipient subjects
lifelong history of mediations with itself and its vocal exten¬
sions begins in crying, crowing, babbling and word-making;
this is where the archaic production pole of music and the art
of language is located. That is why Macho speaks of a vocal-
auditory phase in the pre-oral space, 15 Because voices are not
objects, however, it is impossible to have a “relationship” with
them in the usual sense of the word. Voices produce acoustic
coverings of spheric-presentist expansion, and the only mode
of participation in vocal presences can be described as being-
in within the current sonosphere; 16 the vocal umbilical cord,
like the physical one, is also nobjectal in its structure. When
the mother and her child exchange vocal messages in a direct
play of affection, their interdependency is the perfect self-
realization of an intimate-acoustic bipolar sphere.

3. The third pre-oral phase that needs to be newly con¬
ceived is referred to by Macho as the “respiratory” phase. In
truth, the newborn child’s first partner in the outside world—
before any contact with the surface of the mother s skin—is

Nobjects and Un-Relationships / 2$7

the air it breathes, which now replaces the lost amniotic fluid
as the successive element* The air is also a medial factor, and as
such it can never be defined in object terms. For the child,
extra-maternal being-in-the-world first and last of all means
being-in-the-air and participating without struggles—following
an episode of initiatory breathing difficulty—in the wealth of
this medium. The air, as experienced in the child’s first
encounter with it, possesses unmistakable nobject properties,
as it affords the incipient subject a first chance at self-activity
in respiratory autonomy, but without ever appearing as a thing
with which to have a relationship. It is no coincidence that
until recently, no psychoanalyst—except for the belated fluidist
Wilhelm Reich—had anything quoteworthy to say about the
complex of air, breath and self, 17 probably because even the
simplest breath analysis would have revealed how fundamentally
inappropriate it is to speak in terms of object relationships. 18
Precisely the most elementary medial process, taken on its own
terms, would have made psychoanalytical pretensions and con¬
ceptual habits come to nothing. Macho concludes his
deliberations with the observation that even in its theoretical
language, psychoanalysis has remained a prisoner to old Western
grammar, even where it has long discovered reasons in its
encounter arrangements to sublate ostensible subject-object
relationships into medial processes. Only through a revision of
its basic principles could psychoanalysis—which, in its theo¬
retical and therapeutic potential, is still the most interesting
interpersonal practice of closeness in the modern world—pre¬
sent itself in a suitable language of closeness. Then it could
state openly that every animation is a media event, and that all
psychological disturbances are distortions of participation—

298/ Bubbles

media sicknesses, one could say. The fixation on objects is
itself the logical matrix of neurosis. It need hardly be pointed
out which civilization suffers from this like no other.

Nobjects and Un-Relationships / 299

What, after all this, is negative gynecology? It is first of all a
method to ensure that the woman and her organs do not enter
any form of objectivity. A gynecology is negative or philosophical
if it maintains a renunciation of two things: the obvious possi¬
bility of looking at the vulva from the outside and conceiving it
as an object (gynecological and pornographic vulvograms); and
the temptation, never entirely absent, to pass through the vulva
again as an initiation, as the gate to the inner world. Once these
two attitudes and modes of perception are disabled, the nobject
character of the female non-opening can be made apparent with
ease. It is the non-thing experienced by every naturally born
individual in a single sequence of events; it is the narrow primal
something that only “exists” once in an unrepeatable, dramati¬
cally extended scene. What the observing intelligence before the
cave views as the soft female organ is experienced by the half
that has entered, if it wishes to be reborn, as a giver of the most
monstrous severity. In the nobject view, this organ which,
understood as an object, seems familiar, straightforward, conge¬
nial and yielding, is a tunnel of decision in which the fetus is
motivated to brace itself and become the ultimate breakthrough,

301

a “here I come” projectile. Conceived as a medium, the birth
canal or vulva convey the present experience that there is an
impenetrable wall which must at once also be an opening; this
opening is a function of banging ones head against a wall. For
the new arrival, the hopelessness of standing before the wall
turns directly into the compulsion to break through it. As a nob-
ject, the vulva is the mother of granite. It is evidently impossible
to penetrate this wall at the moment of struggle; by passing
through it nonetheless somehow, however, in extremis , the initiate
who exits experiences himself as the harder stone, the stone that
breaks stone. For most of the born, being born means defeating
a wall.

The arrangement suggested above, where the cave explorer is
split into two halves, and one dissolves experimentally in the
dark interior while the other captures the diurnal worldview
outside, seems eminently suitable for gleaning nobject research
results first hand; it feigns something that psychoanalysis cannot
presuppose, namely the existence of a fetus that is capable of
description. The inside part would then be a sentient probe in a
state of uterine immersion; it would only have to avoid being
silently fulfilled in the experience and instead, supported by
the part keeping guard outside, remain capable of intellectual
satisfaction as a phenomenologist of its own being-in-the-
cave—in Heideggerian terms, its not-yet-thrownness.

Chinese traditions from the heyday of Taoism provide an
eminent example of the paradoxical position of being-outside-
and-inside-at once. The legend about the birth of the master
Lao Tzu, almost unknown in the West, perfectly illustrates the
phantasm of a pregnancy incorporating both a maturing time

302/E5i:ii?bies

m ® vi m, n

“ The Genesis of the Newborn”: meditation image from Taoist alchemy. The union of
kan and li produces an embryo that represents the immortal soul created byTaoists.

within the cave and studies outside of it. In the ancient Chinese
worldview, the implantation of the child in the womb was
already considered the actual birth. The intrauterine period was
thus included in the reckoning of human age; newborns were
termed one-year-olds. The ten lunar cycles of the intrauterine

The Retreat Within the Mother / 303

night form the equivalent of a solar year. In addition, the inner
life constitutes a proportional equivalent of outer existence:
because the mothers gestation period provides a model for the
actual lifetime, its duration determines the length of existence in
the outside world. Ten moons correspond to the life span of an
ordinary human; divine heroes remain in the womb for twelve
months, the great wise men for eighteen. Lao Tzus life in the
inner world, which is given as eighty-one years, indicates a
longevity equal to that of heaven and earth: it is the full cycle of
earthly time as a gestation period. 19 In Taoist doctrine—as often
expressed by Chuang Tzu—the inner always takes precedence
over the outer. The central principle of the divine sphere in
Taoism is the True One, which inhabits the inner realm as an
immortal embryo. Theogonic tales describe in manifold varia¬
tions the former life of Lao Tzu in his mother Li, who has been
known since the 4th century as “Mother Plum Tree, Jade
Maiden of the Obscure Mystery.” 20 In his sympathetic study on
the mystical and social physics of Taoism, the Sinologist
Kristofer Schipper reproduces a version of Lao Tzus birth myth
he wrote down in Taipei in August 1979 after the oral account
of a 74-year-old Taoist master:

There was once an old woman who belonged to the clan of the
Pure Ones. The Old Lord did not have a name. One might say
that originally he was an incarnation. He was born in (the womb
of) a chaste woman. She had no husband, but had become
pregnant after absorbing a drop of “sweet dew.” 21 Her belly
grew bigger, that is to say, during the day she was pregnant; but
she was not pregnant at night, for then die Old Lord would
leave her body to go study the Tao, and so he was not there.

304/ Boobies

This Old Lord was not just anyone! Having taken the
form of an embryo in his mothers belly, he wished to delay
his birth to the day when there would be neither birth nor
death in the world. Thus he waited for more than eighty
years, unable to appear.

The God of the Underworld and the God of Heaven
spoke to each other, saying: “This here is the incarnation of
the Constellation of Destiny. How can we not let him be
born? Let us choose a day when we allow neither birth nor
death so that he may be born on that day.”

It was the fifteenth day of the second moon. On that day
the Old Lord was born. He came into the world through his
mothers armpit [author’s note: cfi the birth of Gautama
Buddha through his mother s hip]. At that very moment, oh!
his hair and beard were all white. Since he knew how to walk,
he set off right away.

His mother said to him: “You! My old child! Why are you
leaving without letting me have a look at you? Why are you
going off as soon as youre born? I wont even know how to
recognize you later!” so he turned around abruptly, his beard
and hair flying... Seeing him, his mother took a fright. She
feinted and died on the spot.

He continued to walk straight ahead, without stopping
until he reached a plum orchard. There he leaned against a tree
and said to himself: “I know neither my name nor my family. I
am leaning against this plum tree [It ]. Why not take Li as my
family name? And what should be my personal name? My
mother called me old child'! So, my name will be ‘Lao Tzu.’”

“Old Lord” is a title of respect. In fact, his name is “Old
Child .” 22

The Retreat Within to Mother / 305

History of a scandal and initiatic tale: Schippers characteriza¬
tion of the myth points both to its intimately didactic function
and its paradoxically self-entwined metaphysical logic. It would
require an extensive study to probe its full implications: Lao
Tzus fatherlessness; the mystical self-fertilization of his mother;
his heterologous birth through the (left) armpit; the numero-
logical implications of the number 81; the refusal of birth and
the call for a birthless and deathless world; the date chosen by the
gods; the immediate separation of the old child from the moth¬
er; her death from fright upon seeing her monstrous offspring;
the genealogical zero point situation and his self-naming; the
connection to fruit tree culture 23 —all this would, among other
things, demand detailed narrative-theoretical, culture-historical,
cosmological and religion-philosophical explications. We shall
limit ourselves to two aspects of this unusual story: the motif of
the learned embryo and the relationships between being-in-the-
mother and experience in the world. In both cases, one finds a
natural link to our methodic trick of connecting uterine imma¬
nence and external observation despite the strict impossibility of
their simultaneity. What else would the fetal student of the Tao,
who exits his mother at night and lives in her belly during the
day, be but a precise embodiment of the notion that it is possi¬
ble to overcome the difference between being inside and being
outside in a unity of a higher order? If one looks more closely,
the reference to Lao Tzus nocturnal study trips outside his
mother transpires as a union-mystical thought figure: it makes
it clear that the divine sage cannot have reached the maternal
interior through external conception; what appears to be the
mothers body is in fact its inhabitant’s own creation. The
difference between inside and outside is itself located within

3067 ELohies

Lao Tzus interior: the child contains the mother and the
child—it is not for nothing that Lao Tzu is known as the Old
Child who constitutes the fetus and the cosmos in one. Even if
the text does not explicitly state that the sage is his own mother,
the tales immanent logic unmistakably leads towards this thesis.
Someone who spends eighty-one years in the womb must him¬
self be the lord of the inner world; the external mother can only
appear as a shell and supplement, which is why his separation
from her is so easily achieved. In other variations on the myth,
Lao Tzu actually projects his mother Li outwards from within
himself in order to enter his own uterine form. If, after eighty-
one years of gestation, everything external—even death—has
been taken up into the internal, and no event from the non¬
interior can surprise the perfect sage anymore, the mother must
not remain any real external factor. The mythical act takes place
in the form of a paradoxical loop; what the mother has to give to
the fetus is in fact what the fetus gives itself through the
mother—the eternal capacity for being-inside in deathless, self-
circling being. The sage is bom so that he will not simply enter
the world as a born mortal; he enters a mothers womb precisely
to avoid entering a short-lived human life cycle. Other variations
on the myth not mentioned here have a similarly paradoxical
form; in these, the short phase of encounter between mother
and child is described as a time in which Lao Tzu is initiated
by his mother into the very secret of longevity that is already
demonstrated by his overextended stay in the womb. The same
paradox reappears in the circumstance that Lao Tzu is born on a
day when birth and death do not exist—his birth is not a birth
into the outside world, and his emergence remains a movement
within outsideless immanence. Thus the Taoist sage ultimately

The Retreat Witriri the Mother / 307

views himself as a gestating woman who is pregnant with
himself; the finite maternal gives birth to the infinite mater¬
nal that spawned it. The maternal has the power to keep the
very difference between outside and inside on the inside. Self-
referential paradoxes of this kind belong to the inventory of
logical forms in all metaphysical systems where the infinite is
supposed to be made manifest in finite media. The finite Son
of God who wandered around the Sea of Galilee also became
known as his own infinite father via the paradox of the Trinity.
This paradox appears slightly more extreme in the New Testa¬
ment Apocrypha, in which Jesus was supposedly an angel
among angels before his incarnation; as the angel Gabriel he
brought his own mother the annunciation of his birth . 24 When
the legendary Saint Christopher carries the baby Jesus across
the water while the infant holds the entire globe in the palm of
his hand, an equally paradoxical question is raised: where is
Saint Christopher to place his feet while carrying the boy, when
the river he is wading through is undoubtedly part of the world
held by the child riding on his shoulders?

Taoism arrives—assuming these sparse intimations have such far-
reaching consequences—if not at a negative, then at least a
polarity-philosophical gynecology. The abstractions in its con¬
ception of the world have not yet been taken to the point of
making the dyad invisible. In its most sublime concepts of unity,
the bipolar mediation and reciprocal animation of child and
mother are present as leitmotifs. From its ontology of uterine
immanence it derives that ethic of feminization for which it has
recently also become known in the West. “Know the male but
cling to the female; become the valley of the world” (Tao Te

308 / Bubbos

( '.fringe Chapter 28). As far as the inner realm is concerned, its
approach is admittedly more evocative than investigative. The
learned embryo that slips out of the cave at night to study the
Tao explores not so much its own small, dark cave, but rather the
great round object that is the illuminated world cave. If we desire
more concrete psychophysiological insights into the form of
being in the narrow, unlit cave, we must look around for the
findings that other researchers, both outside and inside the cave,
have brought to light.

One of the outstanding pioneers of modern psychognostic cave
research is the psychosis therapist and psychoanalyst Ronald D.
Laing (1927-1989). He gained his reputation as an avant-gardist
of psychological theorizing through the radical derestriction of the
psychogenetic model and an opening towards ultra-deep sources of
mental disturbance; in his famous knot models he described inter¬
personal closeness as spindles or whirls of intertwined expectations
and expectations of expectations—the absurd theater of intimacy.
As a therapist, he impressed his contemporaries with his self-
endangering determination to accompany the mentally ill into
even the most extreme states. Laing was disposed to cave research
chiefly because he did not enter the inward path merely in search
of happiness; for him, the cave was not only a place where thought
ends in gratification, but equally a source from which the oldest
pain and the earliest injuries could flow into the present of a dis¬
turbed life. (From which follows the epistemological maxim that
analysis goes further than illumination.)

Laing sought to balance out the existential hindrance that
the researcher naturally has no access to the cave of the past
any longer through the method of free regressive association.

The Retreat W-thin r-e Mother / 309

He analyzed the cave indirectly by reading the current mental
traces of being-formerly-inside-it as indications of the original
situation, and then elaborating them into theoretical notions; his
method follows the model of the scenic-autobiographical explo¬
ration technique in psychoanalysis. In the notorious fifth chapter
of The Facts of Life from 1976, which deals with life before birth,
the author developed a three-stage schema that places dispropor¬
tionate emphasis on inner stages, with no consideration of outer
duration. According to Laings concept, two out of three acts in
our life “cycle” fall into the category of prenatal “existence.” Our
quotations will show that the civil war between philosophy and
common sense which had affected the intellectual balance of
occidental civilization since the founding of Plato s Academy, if
not earlier, returned after its apparent subsidence as a civil war
between depth psychology and vulgar ontology. Idea-historically
speaking, Laings speculations are obviously close to the counter¬
culture movement and orientalism of the 1960s.

Stages in My Life

A conception to implantation

B implantation to birth

C my postnatal life

MO mother before conception

Ml mother from conception to implantation

M1.1 mother from implantation to completion of birth

M2 postnatal mother

One of our great tasks seems to be coming to the realization
that MO = Ml = M2

310 / Bubbles

Do we have a genetic mental map of our whole life cycle
with its different phases—mental patterns which reflect bio¬
logical forms and transforms?

It seems to me credible, at least, that all our experience in
our life cycle from cello one is absorbed and stored from the
beginning, perhaps especially in the beginning. How that may
happen, I do not know.

How can one cell generate the billions of cells I now am?

We are impossible, but for the fact that we are.

When I look at embryological stages in my life cycle I
experience what feel to me like sympathetic reverberations,
vibrations in me now with how I now feel I felt then.

Photographs, illustrations, films of early embryological
stages films of early embryological stages of our life cycle often
move people very much.

If you were to die now, and be reconceived tonight
which woman would you choose to spend the first nine
months of your next lifetime inside of? That many people feel
similar, and often strong, sympathetic vibrations (resonances,
reverberations) when they unguardedly allow themselves to
imagine how they might have felt from conception to and
through birth and early infancy is a fact. 25

Laings meditation on the form of the life cycle resembles the
ancient Chinese view in significant aspects—in particular, his
insistence that this cycle does not only begin at birth, but rather
at conception, expressly restores to the cave year its dignity as
the defining introit of every biographical form. The implantation
of the fertilized egg cell in the uterus would then have to be
taken seriously as the primal event in a life’s history, even if no

Hie Retreat Within the Mother / 311

one can be sure whether it has an experienceable side and a pro¬
jective repetition thereof in later experiences. One can read this
as if, through his inclusion of the earliest stage, Laing had
sought to escape the conspiracy against the unborn in which
almost all those social authorities of modernity—including
women—that wish to make abortions a matter of course direct¬
ly or indirectly participate. One can perceive figures of a less
Taoist than Platonizing cast in Laings view that an overarching
memory of all states and changes is built up from the first cell.
Hence the strong feelings that can arise from involuntary con¬
tact with embryonic motifs in humans, according to Laing,
have the character of reminiscences; they are a mode of self¬
experience in archaic material. The starting point of Laing s
attack on both the vulgar and normal psychoanalytical
worldviews is his radically monadological imposition of under¬
standing the life cycle as the Bildungsroman of the ovum. This
ovum, Laing argues, is not sheltered within an inner world a
priori , but must first attain its protected interior position
through a hazardous transition.

Implantation

Implantation may have been as horrific and as wonderful as
birth; Reverberating through our lives, and being resonated
by experiences of being sucked in, drawn in, pulled in,
dragged down; of being rescued, revived, succoured, wel¬
comed; of trying to get in, but being kept out; perishing
through fatigue, exhaustion; frantic, helpless, impotent, etc.

[...] To put my proposition succinctly: birth is implantation
in reverse and the reception one receives from the postnatal

3127Bubbles

world generates a sympathetic resonance in us of our first
adoption by our prenatal world, (pp. 45f.)

Contrary to the impression these lines may give, Laing is not only
interested in a historical monadology—the epic tale of the des¬
tinies of the ovum as a unity; beyond that, the history of the egg
is the history of its embedding in a pre-objective space as such.

The world is my womb, and my mother s womb was my first
world.

the womb is the first of the series
of contexts
containers
whatever one is in
a room
a space
a time

a relationship
a mood

whatever is

around

whoever 26

is felt as
around me
ones atmosphere
ones circumstances
ones surroundings
the world. 27 (pp. 45£)

Ths Retreat Within the Mother / 313

Starting from these associative notes about being-contained in
surroundings, Laing sketches a delirious diagram that connects
the myth of the hero’s birth—based on Otto Ranks famous
study—to the egg as the cellular hero. Here the author stops
asserting facts in well-formed sentences; instead, he covers the
page before him with word lists, individual words and blocks
whose placing on the page hints at connections in their content.
They can best be read from left to right as parallels.

BLASTULA

... a dome of many-colored glass that stains the white radiance
of eternity

a geodesic dome a space capsule

a sphere fly! rig saucer

a balloon sun-god

the moon football

the zygote and blastula in the zona pellucida
zona pellucida a box first clothing

a casket
an ark

a swan

uterine tube the water the ocean a river

journey along uterine tube time in ocean,

or drifting down river,
to implantation in womb till picked up

by animals or shepherds, etc.

thus conception in myths birth

uterine journey exposure to sea or river in

314 / Bubbles

a box or casket

implantation adoption by animals

uterine endometrium or reception by lowly people

I am not considering whether these analogues are “right,” if
that is a sensible issue, but merely that they are actual. All of
them I have heard or read, as well as made myself, before or
after having heard or read them.

May there be a placental-umbilical-uterine stage of devel¬
opment preceding the breast-oral stage? (p. 59)

We have quoted so extensively so that we can at least use
Laing’s example to illustrate fluctuations between regular argu¬
mentation and dreamy association. His cave probings do not
only work with the known methods of psychoanalytical affect
recollections; if one assesses Laings procedure in his theoretical-
autobiographical experiment as the creative projection of an
archaic spatial understanding, one might conclude that the
associative lists on the loosely written pages are themselves
related to their amorphous object in a quasi-representational
fashion. They make it clear that there are no well-formed sen¬
tences in the place from which the author is attempting to
speak; intrauterine daydreams know no orderly lines of text—
at this point, everything that will later belong to the syntactic
realm is only distantly sensed. Fetal being-in-space is indeed
reproduced more accurately in the fragmentary, sentenceless
floating of key terms in a bubble than by discourses. Because
Laing dreams his way eccentrically into the fetal position in the
act of writing, his thought develops a creatively vague solubility;
his text aims for a suspension in a space with neither verbs nor

Tha Retroa: Wil'vn the Merer /315

a thesis—a dreamtime of reason in which the possible reabsorbs
the real. Words glide across the pages like daydreams, part of
an amorphous text that precedes all other texts. It would thus
seem that the biographical-speculative daydream itself takes on
a fetality-mimetic quality. Nothing is genuinely stated in it, no
system is built, and no sentence is sent off into the real domain;
contemplation remains entirely in that possibility-shaped guise
which fully formed discourses discard in order to say some¬
thing; it is where deconstructions seek to return. No more is
given of the things that could be said than a semantic plasma—
the dream of a true context that, appearing as a thesis, would
definitely be a mistaken one.

If it were permissible to draw conclusions from Laings cave-
daydream experiment about the nature of its object, a first
finding would be this: the cave is a container to which the
inhabitant can only gain access as an intruder. First of all, it is
necessary to move into the uterine home in a daring act of
approach. Whether implantation processes, be they smooth or
problematic, can leave traces within the experiential is, of
course, impossible to determine; the question could not even be
posed without a certain inclination towards ovular Platonism.
After implantation, however, intrauterinity means freedom from
drama and decision-making. From that point until the final
period of narrowness, the sojourn in the uterine interior has a
floating character throughout; the fetus is submerged in dream¬
like indecision, but gradually dreams its way forward. It does
not yet know any “superstitious belief in the existent”; as a
floating being, it keeps itself at the zero point of sentences—in
the neutral core of the slumbering concatenations, as if pre-
syntactically sovereign. If the fetus already had a conception of

.316 / Bubbles

the world, its relationship to it would be that of Romantic irony;
the mute sovereign would make every figure melt down to its
foundation; if it already had a conception of logic, it would be
a monovalent one that distinguished neither between true and
false nor between real and unreal, as in certain Indian mytholo¬
gies where the world appears as the dream of a god: for the god,
nothing really happens in the phenomenal hurricane of events,
desires and sorrows. 28 The fetal sensibility is one of “medial
indifference”; 29 it occupies a medial position in which an incipient
extension begins to become apparent. For the fetus of the opti¬
mal floating months, there is truth in Friedlaenders aphorism:
“Indifference is the immaculate conception of the whole
world.” 30 In kinetic terms, the fetal sensibility means a suspen¬
sion that is in the process of gathering coercive weight; though
entirely locked in its maternal retreat, it is affected by a pre-
tendentious swelling. Despite some aspects of Nirvana, the
arrows of tendency springing up in it point towards the
world—or, carefully put, towards something. Through this
incubation-towards-the-world—and through a first shadowy
defining of polarity in a medial exchange with inner nobjects—
the fetus, though it perhaps fulfills certain attributes of the
divine, eludes the extreme idealizations of mystical theologies—
such as the uncompromisingly negative image of Nirguna-
Brahman painted by the Indian logician Shankara: a God without
qualities who sits enthroned above mountains of negations. In
its bland, slightly tonicized sub-euphoric dark gray, everyday
fetal life contradicts the para-theological phantasms of some
psychoanalysts, who saw fit to effuse about a fetal “I-am-who-I-
am” and intrauterine feelings of omnipotence, immortality and
purity. 31 Compared to such flights of fancy, Kazimir Malevich's

The Repeat Within the Mother / 317

Black Circle offers a realistic snapshot of fetal reality. Whatever
truth there might be in the equation of the womb and Nirvana,
one certainly cannot claim that the incipient individual experi¬
ences a state of complete emptiness at any point. The fetus with
which the mother is pregnant is itself pregnant with its own
tendency to fill out its space and affirm itself within it. The
child’s movements, with their cheerfully enigmatic “cat in the
bag” impressions, testify to this intra-uterine expansionism.
And recent findings in the field of psychoacoustic fetal research
dismiss any such illusions about an initial emptiness of experi¬
ence once and for all: the floating being in the amniotic waters
inhabits an acoustic event space in which its sense of hearing is
subjected to constant stimulation. 32

No author of the twentieth century has found such evoca¬
tive formulations for the tendentious nature of fetal swelling
as the expressionist Schellingian Marxist Ernst Bloch. In the
generative center of his reflection we find a changing figure of
pregnancy-mimetic character. Bloch sees tensions of tendency
arising from the darkness of the lived moment in every con¬
scious life, and these move towards clearing, world formation
and liberation by turning to the concrete. His famous initia¬
tory formulas are like mottos of a fetality that has been made
to speak:

OUT OF ITSELF

I am. But I do not have myself. Thus we are only becoming.

The am of 7 am is within. And everything within is
wrapped in its own darkness. It must emerge to see itself; to
see what it is, and what lies about it. 33

318/Bubbles

TOO CLOSE TO IT

So I am at myself. But the am precisely does not have itself;
we only live it aimlessly. Everything here can only be sensed,
quietly boiling and quietly roaring. I can certainly sense it,
but this too hardly stands out. Almost everything in this sen¬
tient muffledness of mere living still restrains itself...

ROTATION IN VIEW

We do not, at any rate, see what we experience. Whatever is
to be seen must be turned before our eyes...

(.Experimentum Mundi, Frage> Kategorien des Herausbringens>
Praxis)**

If one reads these darkness-to-light formulas as peri-natal figures
of the urge to be born, there is an error of number: from a psy¬
chological perspective, coming-into-the-world precisely does
not mean the movement from I to We, but rather the splitting
of the archaic biune We into the ego and its second element,
simultaneously crystallizing out the third. This splitting is pos¬
sible because the medially conditioned nature of the biunity
means that it always has three parts; in undistorted develop¬
ments, the dyadic triad is always simply reshuffled, concretized,
expanded and modernized:

1 fetus—2 (placental blood/mothers blood)—3 mother;

1 newborn—2 (own voice/mothers voice/mothers milk)

—3 mother;

1 child—2 (language/father/mothers partner)—3 mother.

In© Repeat Within the Mother / 319

Because the middle element gains complexity, the child gradually
develops into a competent exponent of its cultural system. The
trinitary structure of the primary dyad is given from the start,
however. What we call “mother and child” in the abbreviated
terms of subject-object language are, in their mode of being,
only ever poles of a dynamic in-between.

Therefore, as follows from these reflections, there can be nothing
in the earliest life of the psyche that one could rightly describe
as “primary narcissism.” Rather, there is a relationship of strict
mutual exclusivity between the primary and the narcissistic. The
confused narcissism concepts of psychoanalysis are above all an
expression of its fundamentally skewed conceptual disposition,
and of the way it was misled by the object and imago concepts.
The true issues of the primary fetal and peri-natal world—
blood, amniotic fluid, voice, sonic bubble and breath—are
media of a pre-visual universe in which mirror concepts and
their libidinous connotations are entirely out of place. The
child s earliest “auto”eroticisms are eo ipso based on games of
resonance, not mirrorings of the self. Hence the mature subject
status lies not in the supposed turn towards the object, but
rather in the ability to master inner and outer acts at higher
medial levels; for the adult subject, that includes libidinous
genital resonance with sexual partners—which presupposes a
well-tempered departure from the oldest media and their sub-
lation in the later ones. This is what a media-theoretically
reformulated theory of sexuality would have to show.

In our exploration of the space of bipolar intimacy, these refer¬
ences to the fetal retreat within the mother have brought us into

320 / Busbies

contact with the outside of the inner ring. Of all the things we
have said here we shall, in the following, hold onto the fact that
through the basic rule of a negative gynecology one must reject
the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside
views of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is
insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already
the fundamental mistake. The intimate Atlantis cannot be
moved to rise from the sea again for the purpose of its explo¬
ration; and it is even less feasible to go on direct diving missions
as a researcher. Because the lost continent lies sunken in time,
not space, the only means of reconstruction are archeological—
especially the reading of traces in ancient emotional finds. The
current Atlanteans, the new fetuses, refuse to give us informa¬
tion; yet we should no longer draw the wrong conclusions from
their silence. By observing incipient life with delicate empiricism,
one can attempt to sketch outlines of its being-in-the-cave.

Ths Retrea: VVitnn the Mom / 321

Excursus 3

The Egg Principle
Internalization and Encasement

Omne vivum ex ovo.
Omne ovum ex ovario.
— Eduard von Hartmann, The Phibsophy of the Unconscious

On the tide copperplate of William Harveys animal encyclo¬
pedia De generatione animalium from 1651 we see the hand of
Jupiter, father of the gods, holding an egg in two halves.
Numerous creatures have hatched from it, including a child, a
dolphin, a spider and a grasshopper, and it bears a legend: ex
ovo omnia . In the hour of modern biology’s birth, the philoso¬
phy of origin was allowed—as if for the last time—to be the
force behind the publication of the very thing that forced its
demise. The ovum of the biologists is no longer the egg of the
mythologists of origin; nonetheless, the incipient modern life
sciences also fall back on the old cosmogonic motif of the genesis
of all life, indeed the world as a whole, from an original egg.
Through its magical symmetry and its quintessential form, the
egg had served as the primal symbol for the cosmization of
chaos since Neolithic conceptions of the world. It could be

323

Detail from the frontispiece of Wiliam Harvey, De genemtione animalium, 1651

used to show, with the self-evidence of elemental ideas, that
natal creations always constitute a bipartite action: firstly the
production of the egg through a maternal power, and secondly
the self-liberation of the living being from its initial capsules or
shells. Thus the egg is a symbol that teaches us, of its own
accord, to think of the sheltering form and its bursting as a
unity. The origin would not be itself if what emerged from it
did not free itself from it. It would be rendered powerless as the

324/Buobes

origin, however, if it were unable to bind its products to itself
;igain; where being is interpreted through emergence, the
original bond ultimately negates freedom. Because of the para-
metaphysical need for form, the broken vessels cannot have the
last word on the true shape of the whole, and so what is
inevitably lost in each individual case is restored on the larger
scale as the unlosable overall shell encompassing the world and
life; the celestial domes of ancient times were set up as cosmic
guarantees that isolated human existence would remain encom¬
passed by indestructible containers beyond its exit from
capsules and caves. That is why, in the classical age, existence
never means suspendedness in nothingness, 36 only the move
from the narrowest shell to more distant proximity.

The transition from the mythology of origin to the biolo¬
gy of the egg in the work of William Harvey is not without a
certain objective irony; just this once, it is science that goes
further and speaks more effusively in the definition of an
object than myth. Harveys investigations reinforce the egg
principle to an overwhelming extent, expanding and univer¬
salizing it. In this singular matter, demystifying the myth
means generalizing the object of examination in an unprece¬
dented fashion. Although Harvey had no sufficiently powerful
microscope at his disposal, he developed individual observa¬
tions into the hypothesis, later triumphantly confirmed, that
the embryos of all living beings come from egg cells, most of
which—unlike the more noticeable eggs of birds and reptiles—
are inconspicuous, even invisible to the human eye. More than
a generation after Harvey, the Dutch amateur biologist and
microscope builder Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)
showed that numerous small creatures do not result from

The Egg Principle / 325

The Primal Separation Within the World Egg, Rajastan/India, 18th century, gouache
on paper

spontaneous generation in different creative milieus, as had long
been thought, but rather from tiny eggs placed in the sand,
wheat or mud by their mothers. Thus myth was outdone by
science; in the ontogenesis of sexually reproducing life forms,
the egg phenomenon was assigned a quasi-universality of which
even the mythologists of origin had never dared to dream. It is
only with the egg principle that the ontogenetic motif of living
things emerging into the open from a place inside gained its
maximum biological validity. The egg is the only cell able to
survive outside of the organism that produces it; it thus acts as
the model for the idea of the microcosmic monad. The rela¬
tionship between the egg and the non-egg prefigures all
theorems of the organism in its environment. One could almost
say that later monadologies and system theories are merely
exegeses of the egg phenomenon. From the perspective of the

326/Bubboft

egg as a gamete, every environment becomes a specific being-
around-for-what-emerges-from-the-egg.

Understood as in its biological universality, the egg
instructs biological thought to give the endogenesis of the living
priority over all external relationships; as a consequence, being
outside can now only ever be a continuation of being inside in
a different milieu. Thus the earliest form of what would later
be called the “autopoiesis” of systems established itself from a
reproduction-biological perspective. For the Modern Age, being-
from-the-egg became the emergency situation of endogenesis.
For living things, existence now means—more bindingly than
in all mythology—coming-from-within. The containers func¬
tioning as eggs, whether membranes, gelatinous capsules or
shells, represent the boundary principle; they seal off the inner
from the outer. At the same time, they allow highly selective
communications between the egg and its environment—such
as exchange of moisture and ventilation. As materialized entities
for differentiating between inside and outside, shells and
membranes thus act as media amid border traffic. In accor¬
dance with the specific needs of the inner world, they only
permit an extremely reduced amount of external information
and substances through: primarily gas, warmth and liquid.

As far as human embryogenesis is concerned, it is sub¬
ject—as among the related warm-blooded, live-bearing
mammals—to the evolutionarily late and highly jeopardous
condition that the egg is no longer deposited in external media
or containers, as with the vast majority of species, but rather
implanted in the mother organism itself. This internalization of
the egg assumes such revolutionary organ creations as utero-
genesis and placentogenesis—in organ-historical terms,

T te Egc P'-'-cipie / 327

transformations of the yolk system into womb-immanent nest
and nourishment systems. It is in these that the evolutionary
sources of hominid-typical interiority lie; only through them
are births necessitated as tribe-historically new event types in
the ontogenetic process. Because of inward ovulation, the exit
from the womb ascends to the position of the proto-drama of
animal emergence. It supplies the primal type of an ontic
change of location that is of ontological relevance: through
birth, that which is close and innermost is abandoned to an
inescapable tearing-open by the distant. What in ontological
terms is openness to the world is ontically co-conditioned by
the compulsion to be born. The luxuriant development
towards the interiorization of the egg—along with the chronic,
endogenous ovulation cycles—creates the background for the
hazardous gain of the outside through the new organism.

In warm-blooded live-bearing mammals, birth constitutes a
triple shell rupture: firstly, the bursting of the amniotic sac,
which must ensure the separateness of the ferns in the maternal
milieu as an elastic equivalent of the eggshell; secondly, the exit
from the uterus through the uterine orifice—the organic exodus
made possible by the contractions; and thirdly, the passage
through the birth canal into the extra-maternal, completely other
milieu, which transpires as the true outside world compared to
the intrauterinity and amniotic immanence. From a topological
perspective, however, this process of triple de-shelling does not
necessarily plunge the infant into a shelless mode of being
because, under normal conditions, the lasting proximity of the
mother compensates, as the spheric fourth shell, for the loss of
the material first three. This muted change of milieu from an
inner to an outer uterine space takes place among all higher

328 / Btibol8£!

Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

life forms that produce highly immature and nest-dependent
offspring. Hence all these life forms are essentially psychopa-
thizable: their maturation to participation in adult games of
behavior can be distorted through injury of the extra-uterine
fourth shell. Among all creatures, homo sapiens enjoys—along
with his pets—the precarious privilege of finding it the easiest to
become psychotic, in so far as one understands psychosis as the
trace of the failed change of shells. It is the result of that mis¬
carriage which each of us, as the suffering-attuned subject of a
mis-move into the crutchless and shelless realm, represents.
Using this notion of psychosis as the reverberation of an earlier
spheric catastrophe, it becomes clear why psychosis has to be the
latent primal theme of modernity. Because the process of moder¬
nity implies an initiation of humanity into the absolute outside,
a theory of substantial modernization can only lead to credible
and existentially handleable formulations as a transcript of the

The Eyg Principle / 329

»»#r

Fortunius l.icetus, Head of Medusa, Found in an Egg, frontispiece of De Monstris, 1665

33Q / BuBb-es

ontological process psychosis. As the age of the systematic
shifting of boundaries, collective husk pathologies and epidemic
shell disturbances, the current epoch calls for a historical anthro¬
pology of processive madness.

The Eqq Principe / 331

Excursus 4

“In Dasein There Lies an Essential
Tendency towards Closeness ," 37

Heidegger's Doctrine of Existential Place

Only a few Heidegger exegetes seem to have realized that the sen¬
sational programmatic title of Sein und Zeit also contains an
embryonically revolutionary treatise on being and space. Under
the spell of Heideggers existential analytics of time, it has mostly
been overlooked that this is rooted in a corresponding analytics
of space, just as the two in turn rest on an existential analytics
of movement. That is why one can read an entire library about
Heideggers doctrine of temporalization [Zeitigung] and his¬
toricity—ontochronology—and a few studies on his principles of
movedness [ Bewegtheit ] and ontokinetics, but nothing—aside
from unquotable pietistic paraphrases—on his work towards a
theory of the original admission of space, 38 or ontotopology.

Heideggers analytics of existential spatiality arrives at a
positive tracing of the spatiality of Dasein as approach and
orientation in two destructive steps. And indeed, the spatial
concepts of vulgar physics and metaphysics must be done away
with before one can address the existential analytics of being-in.

What is meant by “Being-in"! Our proximal reaction is to

round out this expression to “Being-in ‘in the world/” and we

333

are inclined to understand this Being-in as w Being in some¬
thing” [ u $ein in...”]. This latter term designates the kind of
Being which an entity has when it is “in” another one, as the
water is "in” the glass, or the garment is "in” the cupboard.

[...] Both water and glass, garment and cupboard, are "in”
space and "at” a location, and both in the same way* This rela¬
tionship of Being can be expanded: for instance, the bench is
in the lecture-toom, the lecture-room is in the university, the
university is in the city, and so on, until we can say that the
bench is "in world-space.” All entities whose Being "in” one
another can thus be described have the same kind of Being—
that of Being-present-at-hand—as Things occurring "within”
the world. [...]

Being-in, on the other hand, is a state of Daseins Being;
it is an existentiale . So one cannot think of it as the Being-pre¬
sen t-at-hand of some corporeal Thing (such as a human body)

“in” an entity which is present-at-hand. [...] "In” is derived
from “ innari *—“to reside,” "habitant "to dwell” [sich aujbal -
ten\. “ An ” signifies “I am accustomed,” "I am familiar with,”

“I look after something.” It has the signification of “colo” in
the senses of “habito* and " diligo .” [...] "Being” [Sein] as the
infinitive of “ich bin 9 (that is to say, when it is understood
as an existentiale ), signifies “to reside alongside*,.,” “to be
familiar with*..” 39

In his reference to the Old High German verb innan , "to inhabit,”
Heidegger already discloses the crux of the existential analysis of
spatiality early on in his investigation; what he calls being-in-
the-world is nothing other than the world "inside” in a
verbal-transitive sense: living in it and benefiting from it already

334/BwiDb-es

have been explored in prior acts of attunement and reaching
out. Because existence is always a completed act of habitation—
the result of a primal leap into inhabitation—spatiality is an
essential part of it. Speaking about inhabitation in the world does
not mean simply attributing domesticity within the gigantic to
those who exist: for it is precisely the possibility of being-at-
home-in-the-world that is questionable, and to presuppose it as
a given would be a relapse into the very physics of containers that
is here meant to be overcome. This, incidentally, is the primal
error of reasoning that is found in all holistic worldviews and
doctrines of uterine immanence and hardens into pious half-
thought. Nor is the house of being a casing in which those who
exist come and go, however. 40 Its structure is more like that of a
ball of care [Sorge] in which existence has spread out in an origi¬
nal being-outside-itself. Heideggers radical phenomenological
attentiveness removes the foundation of the multi-millennial rule
of container physics and metaphysics: man is neither a living
being in the world around him nor a rational being in the firma¬
ment, nor a perceiving being inside of God. Consistently with
this, the talk of the environment that has been on the rise for the
last twenty years is also an object of phenomenological critique:
biology does not think, any more than any other standard
science. ‘‘Nowadays there is much talk about mans having an
environment 5 ; but this says nothing ontologically as long as this
‘having 5 is left indefinite.” {Being and Time , p. 84) But what is
meant by the “aroundness of the environment”?

From what we have been saying, it follows that Being-in is not
a “property” which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does
not have, and without which it could be just as well as it could

“In Dasein There Lies an Essen* al Tencency towards Qioaeness.“ / 335

with it. It is not the case that man “is" and then has, by way
of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the 4 world”—a
world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is
never “proximally” an entity which is, so to speak, free from
Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up
a "relationship” towards the world. Taking up relationships
towards the world is possible only became Dasein, as Being-in-
the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just
because some other entity is present-at-hand outside of
Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can “meet up
widi” Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show
itself within a world A{

The existential blindness to space in conventional thought mani¬
fests itself in the old worldviews in the fact that they integrate
humans more or less automatically into an encompassing nature
as cosmos. 42 In modern thought, Descartes 5 division of substances
into the thinking and the extended offers the most pronounced
example of the reluctance to consider the place of “meeting” still
questionable in itself. Because everything Descartes has to say
about spatiality remains connected to the body-and-thing com¬
plex as the only possessors of extension, the question of where
thought and extension converge is one that cannot come up for
him. The thinking thing remains a worldless authority that,
strangely enough, is seemingly able to submit to the whim of
sometimes entering into a relationship with extended things and
sometimes not. The res cogitans bears some of the traits of a
ghostly hunter, bracing himself up to go on forays into the realm
of the recognizably extended before withdrawing once more to
his worldless fortress in the extensionless domain. Contrary to

338/Bubbles

this, Heidegger insists on the original being-in of Dasein in the
sense of being-in-the-world. Knowledge too is merely a deriva¬
tive mode of staying in the spaciousness of the world disclosed
through circumspective concern:

When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it
does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has
been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is
such that it is always “outside” alongside entities which it encoun¬
ters and which belong to a world already discovered* Nor is any
inner sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells alongside die enti¬
ty to be known, and determines its character; but even in this
“Being-outside” alongside the object, Dasein is still “inside,” we
understand this in the correct sense; that is to say, it is itself
“inside” as a Being-in-the-world which knows. And furthermore,
the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with
one's booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness after one has gone
out and grasped it; even in perceiving, retaining, the Dasein
which knows remains outside\ and it does so as Dasein , 43

In his positive statements about the spatiality of Dasein, Hei-
degger emphasizes two characters in particular: de-severance
and directionality.

“De-severing” amounts to making the farness vanish—that is,
making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it
close. Dasein is essentially de-severant [...]. De-severance
discovers remoteness. [...] Proximally and for the most part,
de-severing is a circumspective bringing-close—bringing
something close by, in the sense of procuring it, putting it in

"ir Dasein There Lies an Essential Tendencytowards .CoaShfcBS/ / 339

readiness, having it to hand. [...) In Dascin there lies an
essential tendency towards closeness, (pp. 139f.)

Dasein, in accordance with its spatiality, is proximally
never here but yonder; from this “yonder” it comes back to its
“here”[...]. (p. 142)

As de-severant Being-in, Dasein has likewise the char¬
acter of directionality. Every bringing-close [Ndherung] has
already taken in advance a direction towards a region out of
which what is de-severed brings itself close [sich nahert ]. [...]
Circumspective concern is de-severing which gives direc¬
tionality. (p. 143)

When we let entities within-the-world be encountered in
the way which is constitutive for Being-in-the-world. This
“giving space,” which we also call “making room” for them,
consists in freeing the ready-to-hand for its spatiality. [...] In
concerning itself circumspectively with the world, Dasein can
move things around or out of the way or “make room” for
them only because making room—understood as an existen-
tiale—belongs to its Being-in-the-world [...] the “subject”
(Dasein), if well understood on to logically, is spatial, (p. 146)

Whoever expected these mighty rhetorical overtures to be
followed by the piece itself would be sorely disappointed. The
existential analysis of “where” abruptly switches to an analysis
of “who,” without the slightest mention of the fact that the
author has only pulled out the beginning of a thread that is still
mostly wound up. Had it been unraveled further, it would
inevitably have opened up the multi-significant universes of
existential spaciousness addressed here under the catchword
“spheres.” Inhabitation in spheres cannot be explicated in

340 / Bubbles

detail, however, as long as existence [Dasein] is understood pri¬
marily in terms of a supposedly natural inclination towards
loneliness. 44 The analytics of the existential “where” demands
for all suggestions and moods of essential loneliness to be
parenthesized, in order that we can verify the deep structures of
accompanied and augmented existence. In the face of this task,
the early Heidegger remained an existentiale in the problematic
sense of the word. His hasty turn to the “who” question leaves
behind a lonely, weak, hysterical-heroic existential subject that
thinks it is the first to die, and remains pitifully uncertain of
the more hidden aspects of its embeddedness in intimacies and
solidarities. A quixotic “who” in a confused “where” may have
nasty surprises in store for itself if it attempts to anchor itself in
the next best collective. When Heidegger, carried away by
imperial enthusiasm, sought to rise to greatness in the nationalist
revolution, it became apparent that without a radical clarifi¬
cation of its position within the political space, existential
authenticity leads to blindness. From 1934 on, Heidegger
knew—albeit only implicitly—that his fervor for the National
Socialist awakening had been a being-sucked-in: time had
become space. Whoever falls prey to this suction lives in a
different sphere while seemingly still here; on a distant stage, in
an uncomprehended Yonder. Heideggers late work discreetly
draws the conclusions from this lapse. The cheated volkisch
revolutionary has few expectations left of the history unfolding
around him; he has retired from the work of the forces. In
future he will seek salvation in even more intimate exercises in
closeness. He doggedly sticks to his anarchic province and
offers guided tours of the House of being, language—the per¬
fect magical concierge, equipped with heavy keys, always ready

in Dasein Lies an Essential Tendency towards Closeness * / 341

to offer profound hints. In emotional moments he invokes the
sacred Parmenidean orb of being as if he had returned to the
Eleatic, weary of historicity as an unholy specter. Heideggers
late work keeps acting out the figures of resignation offered by
a revolutionary deepening of thought, without ever returning
to the point from which he might once more have taken up the
question of the original admission [Einraumung\ of the world.

The present project, Spheres , can also be understood as an
attempt to recover—in one substantial aspect, at least—the pro¬
ject wedged sub-thematically into Heideggers early work,
namely Being and Space , from its state of entombment. We
believe that as much of Heideggers interest in rootedness as can
be salvaged comes into its own here through a theory of pairs, of
geniuses, 45 of augmented existence. Finding a rooting in the
existing duality: this much autochthony must be retained, even
if philosophy attentively continues to practice its indispensable
emancipation from the empirical commune. For thought, it is
now a matter of working anew through the tension between
autochthony (ah ovo and in terms of the community) and release
(in terms of death or the infinite),

342/ Bubbles

CHAPTER 5

The Primal Companion
Requiem for a Discarded Organ

Che faro senza Euridice?
Dove andro senza il mio ben? 1
— C. W. Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice

We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go

out that archangels may come in.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation

The black of the eye has to expand for the sight to be main¬
tained in the dark. If the dark grows as deep as in the exquisite
night, it would be helpful if the eye could become as large as the
eye itself. Perhaps such a spheric eye would be ready for what lies
before us: the journey through a black monochrome. If the
subject in the dark had become wholly a pupil, the pupil wholly a
tactile organ, and the tactile organ wholly a sounding body, the
homogeneous massif of that orb of blackness could unfold into
landscapes already sensed. Suddenly a world before the world
would begin to transpire; a vague, ethereal universe would take
shape, as delicate as breath and pre-discrete. The salty night

343

The present project, Spheres, can also be understood as an
attempt to recover—in one substantial aspect, at least—the pro¬
ject wedged sub-thematically into Heidegger’s early work,
namely Being and Space, from its state of entombment. We
believe that as much of Heideggers interest in rootedness as can
be salvaged comes into its own here through a theory of pairs, of
geniuses, 45 of augmented existence. Finding a rooting in the
existing duality: this much autochthony must be retained, even
if philosophy attentively continues to practice its indispensable
emancipation from the empirical commune. For thought, it is
now a matter of working anew through the tension between
autochthony (ah ovo and in terms of the community) and release
(in terms of death or the infinite).

342 / Bubbles

CHAPTER 5

The Primal Companion
Requiem for a Discarded Organ

Che faro senza Euridice?
Dove andro senza il mio ben? 1
— C. W. Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice

We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go

out that archangels may come in.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation

343

would remain safe in its unspeakable density, and its circle
would still be sealed with no possible exit; and yet an organic
something would begin to stand out, like a sculpture of black
mercury against a black background. Within the undifferentiated,
sketches of areas would diverge, and in the intimate closeness a
first Yonder would polarize itself, enabling an incipient Here to
return to itself.

What could one do to attune oneself to the silent expeditions
in the monochrome night? At what other scenes—or unseens—
would the eye be schooled for the journey into the black land?
Would it be helpful to assume the lotus position, close ones eyes
and temporarily renounce all things visible and imagined? But
how many have boarded the boat of meditation only to drift out
into the immaterial, where research ends in lack of curiosity.
Should one experiment with drugs, and travel through alterna¬
tive universes as an inquisitive psychonaut? In most cases,
however, such interior journeys only replace everyday images
with eccentric ones, which flicker through the cave like endoge¬
nous action films; such apparitions dilute the dark space as such
all the more, and the art of reading figures in the black mono¬
chrome does not get any further. If one casts a glance at the
reports from LSD sessions written by patients of the drug thera¬
pist Stanislav Grof about their supposed amniotic regressions,
one has the impression that these people experience what they
have read, and reproduce eloquent images of the horttis conclusus
as a uterine fantasy; they pass off educational tours of the gyne¬
cological atlas as their own experiences; images of paradise from
Sunday school mingle with archaic spatial memories; in garishly
visual imaginings, they see heavenly fields and choirs of light sur¬
rounding the divine throne, sights to which no womb-dweller

Th$ Primal Ccr»paiv.on /345

has ever been privy. This suggests that at best, even the psy¬
chognostic wonder drug LSD only produces synthetic
conglomerates of experience in which early scenic elements are
mingled with later verbal and visual ones to such a degree that one
can scarcely speak of a return to some authentic primary state. So
what is to be done when even truth drugs yield disinformation?
Would it be better to accompany miners on their journey into
the shaft and follow their trail into the drifts, without light or site
plans, to pause somewhere in the depths and gauge how the
mountain spreads its density out in all directions around the
breathing life point? Such an exercise would only be a sporting
self-test, however, and would end with the examinee being left at
the mercy of his own heartbeat in the silent stone space, having
to restrain the incipient panic of his excited thoughts; so this
undertaking also fails to lead back to the scene before all scenes.
It would not advance the exploration of the only nocturnal cave
that concerns us. Descents into foreign tunnels do not lead you
back into the incomparable black monochrome background
from which your life began to emerge as a vibrating figure long
ago. Seeing in the only darkness that concerns you cannot be
practiced on a different darkness; there is no alternative to con¬
fronting your own black monochrome. Whoever tackles this will
soon understand that life is deeper than ones autobiography;
writing never penetrates far enough into ones own blackness. We
cannot write down what we begin as.

The first “where” still lacks the slightest outlines of structure or
content. Even if I knew that this is my cave, all it would initially
mean is that I am lying here as a deep gray Hegelian cow in my
own night, indistinguishable from anything or anyone else. My

346 / Bubbles

Kazimir Malevich, The Black Circle

being is still an uncreased heaviness. As a black basalt ball I rest
within myself, brooding in my milieu as if it were a night made
of stone. And yet, as self-sufficient as I might be, some inkling of
difference must already have dawned inside the dark massif in
which I live and weave. If I were merely a basalt black, how could
it be that a vague sense of being-in is taking root within me?
What is the meaning of this feeling, this floating bulge? If my
black were seamlessly joined to the mountains eternally dead
interior of the same black, why would I feel a hasty beating

The Primal Companion / 347

Salagrama (memento stone for Indian pilgrims): drilled scone containing
ammonite, length 90 mm. The drilled hole represents the beginning of creation
through an opening outwards.

stirring within me, and above it the slower distant drum? If I
were indistinguishably merged with the black substance, how
could I already be something that senses a space and makes first
stretching movements within it? Can there be a substance that is
simultaneously sensation? Are there mountains that are pregnant
with non-rocks? Has anyone ever heard of a basalt that will
develop as animation and self-awareness? Strange thoughts,

34B / Bubb'es

vapors from dark vaults—they seem to be the sort of problems on
which the dead pharaohs ruminate in their crypts for millennia
without making any progress. Mummy meditations, glimmers in
the mineral, brooding without a subject. Can one conceive of
an incident that would make such questions become those of
a living human?

For the time being, however, we will have to look around
for assistance—though not from gynecologists; they run
through the female interior with organ names and street shoes
like tourists from afar through oriental establishments, blinded
by their booked interests. No: the observer at the entrance
whose support we should now seek can, at this stage, be any¬
one except a user of anatomical terms. He should be more like
an aging psychoanalyst, or a hermit whom people with con¬
cerns that evade words seek out—perhaps a person who
devotes himself to what we referred to above as magnetopathic
procedures of closeness; a person, at any rate, who knows how
to be present without intervening in the others existence
except in ways that are themselves given through his discreet,
attentive presence. To progress in our inner observation we
must now, as stated above, introduce an additional view from
the outside that is connected to these goings-on not through
interference, merely through witness. Let us therefore make an
appointment with the helper in front of the cave, and let us
give him the task of advancing the hesitant elucidation of the
spheric night.

In his study on what he calls “monadic” communion, the
psychoanalyst Bela Grunberger has published an example of an
encounter in the core area of the bipersonal intimate space that
is as questionable as it is thought-provoking:

P>3 Purvis Companion / 349

A young man went into analysis because of various difficulties
with relationships, a number of somatic symptoms and sexual
disturbances, etc. After the therapist had told him the basic
principles, he lay down on the couch and said nothing for the
rest of the session. He came to the next one, and for a few
months acted in exactly the same way. Then, in one particular
session, he finally broke his silence and said: "We’re not there
yet, but it’s getting better.” After that he fell silent again, and
after another few months in which he said not a single word,
he stood up at the end of one meeting, declared that he was
feeling well today, believed he was cured, thanked his therapist
and left. 2

This bizarre case history—almost a legend in its tone and con¬
tent—would never have come to light if various circumstances
had not coincided to lead to its publication. Firstly, its narrator
is an author of such authority in his circles that he could take the
liberty of digressing into problematic areas without any immediate
danger to himself; thus the therapeutic idyll of his account could
pass unassailed under the mantle of his integrity. Secondly, it
seems that these events took place in the practice of a colleague;
so, if the analysts part in the silent duo dictated by the patient
had been a professional error—which, without contextual
knowledge, cannot be ruled out—it would be that of his
colleague rather than his own. Thirdly, the author believes he is
presenting an innovatively precise theory of early mother-child
communion for which this peculiar case history can be declared
a piece of evidence. It is in fact Grunbergers ambition to develop
a theorem of w pure narcissism” that is meant to lead to a con¬
cept of psychoanalysis “beyond drive theory.” According to

3507 Buftbte

Grunberger, the characteristics of pure narcissism include the
subject’s freedom from drive tensions and its striving for a splen¬
didly omnipotent, disturbance-hostile and blissful homeostasis.
This pure tendency can ipso facto only unfold under the protec¬
tion of a form that provides the subject with a sufficiently
sealed-off mental incubator—and the scene described offers, in
the authors opinion, both a daring and a perfect example of this.
Grunberger calls this protective ideal form the monad —
undoubtedly in conscious modification of Leibniz’ term, and
consciously ignoring the fact that the content of this monad
corresponds to what other psychoanalysts call the dyad. The
objective reason for choosing the former term over the latter is
that the monad is a form with a unifying container function; the
one acts as the shaping capsule that harbors the two. The monad
would thus be a bipolar matrix or a single psychospheric form
entirely in keeping with the concept of the primary microsphere
expounded here. For Grunberger, monads—as formal units—
can be assigned variable content; hence they appear both in the
original mother-child combination and in reassociations and
substitutions reached at different points in life. The monadic
motif asserts itself whenever individuals enjoy their imaginary
perfection in an intimate psycho-spatial community with the
ideal other. Primary union can equally be represented in Romeo-
Juliet relationships or in Philemon-Baucis symbioses; it appears
as the playing community of child and animal or child and
doll—indeed, the monadic pact can even be made with virtual
animals and heroes from computer games; in its most mature
form, it may present itself as a relationship of admiration
between an adult and a charismatic personality; and finally, it can
be enacted as a therapeutic contract between the analyst and the

The Primal Companion / 351

client. This great scenic variability confirms that the monad is
indeed a formal concept that, like an algebraic formula, can be
applied at will within certain boundaries. As Grunberger notes,
“the monad consists of content and containers,” 3 and hence a
stable form of biunity and a large repertoire of filling-in material
offered by concrete bipolar models of closeness—in so far as
these are capable of supporting the phantasm of the unchal¬
lenged authority of self-enjoyment in the shared interior.

What, one wonders, actually went on during that young
mans months of wordless sessions with the silent analyst? Can
this joint waiting in stillness, which seems ultimately to have led
to some form of cure, really be interpreted as a monadic creation
of form in Grunberger $ sense? Does the scene, in effect, involve
nothing other than the patients dive into the healing dual,
which lays down no premises except the unreserved permission
to stay in a space impregnated by the proximity of the benevo¬
lent intimate witness? It is reasonable to ask where the young
man finds the willful confidence to dominate the situation
through his persistent non-speaking, when psychoanalysis,
especially in France, has the reputation of being a verbal therapy—
not to say an exercise in verboseness or a school for budding
novelists. What kind of complicity did the patient draw his
analyst into when he succeeded in imposing his silence upon
him in a game of two halves, each lasting several months?
However one chooses to answer these questions, one thing
seems obvious: based on the description of the scene, there is no
evidence of a pre-Oedipally symbiotic mother-child relationship
between the young man and the analyst. If the client came to
the analyst like a problem infant to its substitute mother, such
an encounter would contain the seed for dramatic developments

352/BubDtes

that would have to be reenacted in the analytical relationship as
a tense back-and-forth. Someone who remains in silence with his
analyst for months, then goes home claiming to be cured, could
be many things—but not a subject that has realized and acted
out its subsequent demands of a failing mother with the analyst.
Rather, the latter is here deprived of the role to which his title
refers. He is stripped of his interpretative authority and power to
differentiate, and remolded into a being that is supposed to
provide the conditions for a curative self-integration merely
through his silent co-existence. But in what role can the analyst—
who would be more accurately termed an integrator or monitor
here—provide such effects? What old stage forms the setting for
this silent meeting between a man on the couch and another in
an armchair? It only becomes clear how much of a riddle this
question is when one calls to mind that in the repertoire of early
forms of mother-child closeness, there is not one scene that could
remotely have acted as a model for this duel-like fusion of two
silent partners over a period of months. Whatever might take
place between mother and child, the two do not form a sound¬
less meditation group at any point in their interaction process. So
what game are the figures in Grunberger s case history playing?
What does each represent for the other—and what blind site is
the location of their meeting? Where is the Yonder from which
the two mutes return to their Here?

Our suspicion seems well-founded: we could be dealing here
with a scenic equivalent of the fetal night. In the analysts studio
we find ourselves, just this once, in the middle of the therapeutic
monochrome: the monadic field, it seems, conjures up the black
primal scene in which the speechless subject is pre-linguistically
contained and nurtured by an encompassing milieu. Though this

Tha Primal Companion / 363

scene does nor feature anything that could be called an event, it
contains—provided that the young mans final claim was based
on something substantial—an integrative togetherness with
concrete life-practical effects. Naturally we cannot be sure
whether the shared nothingness does contain some traces of
words that elude the outside observer; what is certain, however,
is that the homogeneous dark and signless space has divided
itself into an archaic bipolarity. A first amorphous other has
appeared, with neither eyes nor voice. Let us suppose that the
young man is our cave explorer: then who is the other, waiting
in his analysts armchair and facing his clients silent presence
with his own hour after hour? Whose revenant is this precarious
other? To what lost existence does he lend his present body?
What role does he play by remaining so humbly and patiently
in his seat close to the patient, refraining from all expression of
his own? What mission from what past might it be which
demands that the analyst put aside his own life, his tempera¬
ment and his knowledge to such a degree that no more of him
remains in the space than a sponge, absorbing the patient’s
silence and nourishing it with its counter-silence?

The analyst, then, does not represent the mother in the
usual sense, although he forms one part of the therapeutic
monad, that is to say the metaphorical-uterine immune form.
Should one instead assume that he is the uterus itself, the ego¬
less organ or milieu in which the individuation of an organism
takes place? Is he the velvet wall on whose surface the egg once
setded after its first journey? Does he keep himself available, like
the maternal mucous membrane in which the egg has implanted
itself as a grateful parasite, just as certain mushrooms accumu¬
late on the trunks of old trees with the aim of multiplying

354 (Bubbles

peacefully? Such an assumption may seem suggestive for a
moment, but it quickly loses its plausibility as soon as one
transfers it to the given therapeutic scene: over many months,
two men persistently meet in a closed room to wage a fightless
fight in the inaudible. Each of them spreads out his dome of
silence around him, searchingly holding out his own stillness to
that of the other. This pre-dialogic, almost dueling aspect of the
silence-to-silence, ear-to-ear events is quite different from a
mere nesting on a living wall, and more than simply the irre¬
sponsible license to swim in a bubble that demands nothing and
permits every freedom. One already finds a pre-confrontational
dual structure developing in this silence cl deux ; the silence of the
one is not identical to the silence of the other. The two domes
of silence bang together, creating a silent chord with elements of
an earlier Here-Yonder structure.

So whom—or what—does the analyst represent in this
scene? He stands, it would seem, for an archaic, unpopular organ
whose task is to make itself available to the fetal pre-subject as a
partner in the dark. In physiological terms, this organ of the first
other and the original togetherness is absolutely real: anyone who
wanted to enter the womb by endoscopic means would be able
to see it with his own eyes and touch it with his own hands; he
could photograph it and make anatomical maps of it; or he could
write dissertations about the vascular system and the villous
structures of the curious tissue, precisely describing its function
in the exchange of blood between mother and fetus. But as we
are committed here to applying the methods of negative gyne¬
cology, it is pointless for now to label that organ which, in the
original inner togetherness, is yonder, with its anatomical name.
If this name were uttered too soon, the investigation would

The Prloial Csmoarion / 355

degenerate into uninformative externality and once again con¬
fuse anatomical imagining with first psychology. How quickly
such things can happen can be seen in the barely established, yet
in this respect rapidly dated field of perinatal psychology. Here
too, the men in street shoes are on the move in the pre-objective
realm, bringing false daylight into the night with reifying termi¬
nologies. To avoid straying onto the misguided path of object
relationship theory, we shall give the organ with which the pre¬
subject floats in communication in its cave a pre-objective name:
we shall call it the With . If it were possible to cross out the term
“fetus” too, and replace it with a similarly de-reifying name, this
retreat to anonymity would be equally preferable in its case;
unfortunately, the prenatal pre-subject is associated too strongly
with its medical name, and any butcher in professors clothing
can speak of fetuses like public objects. If we were to give this
being a new name, it would be called thcAlsOy as the fetal subject
only comes about through returning from the With yonder to
the Here, the “also here” As far as the With is concerned, its
quality of presence is neither that of a person nor that of a
subject, but rather a living and life-giving It that remains
yonder-close-by. Facing the With thus means returning from the
Yonder, which marks a first location, to the Here, where the Also
grows. Hence the With acts as an intimate usher for the Also-self.
It is rhe first close factor to share the original space with the Also
by nurturing and justifying it. The With therefore exists only in
the singular—what the With of another would be can eo ipso not
be the same as mine. Thus the With could, with good reason,
also be termed the With-me —for it accompanies me, and me
alone, like a nourishing shadow and anonymous sibling. This
shadow cannot follow me—not least because I would not know

356 / Bubbles

how to get moving myself—but by being there and appearing to
me, it constantly shows me my place in the space before all
spaces; by being consistently faithful and nurturingly close Yon -
der y it gives me a first sense of my lasting Here. What will one day
be my speaking ego is an elaboration of that delicate place to
which I learned to return as long as the With was close to it. In
a sense, the shadower goes ahead of the shadowed; in so far as it
exists, I also exist. The With is the first thing that gives and lets
things be. If I have what it takes to turn from an Also into an ego,
it is not least because the With has let me sense the place in
which I have begun to find a rooting as an augmentable creature
that feels across and is open in a polar fashion. Like an imper¬
ceptible, drawn-out lightning bolt illuminating the nightscape,
the With introduces an inexhaustible difference into the homo¬
geneous monochrome by imprinting ways to approach the
back-and-forth into the reawakening Here-Yonder sphere. From
it, energies flow to me that form me. Nonetheless, it remains
unassuming in itself, never demanding its own presence. We are
accompanied so naturally by the With that scarcely any pre-idea
of its indispensability can form in either the personal or the
general consciousness. As the humblest, quietest something that
will ever have come close to us, the With immediately retreats as
soon as we seek to fix it with our gaze. It is like a dark little
brother placed by our side so that the fetal night would not be
too lonely; a little sister who, at first glance, is merely there to
sleep in the same room with us. One could think its only mission
is to share its peace with yours. Like an intrauterine buder, it
stays close and on the fringe, discreet and nourishing, privy to
our two-party secret, which no one except you and it will ever
know about. The With does have properties of a physical organ,

The Primal Companion / 357

but for you—because you are yourself still a creature without
organs—it is not a real bodily thing; and if it were, it would only
be one that was formed purely to accompany you, an organic
angel and secret agent in the service of the Dear Lady whom you
inhabit because she invited you to come. The With is an
intrauterine probation officer for you alone, you, the untroubled
problem child of the alchemical night. Just as Kafka’s supplicant
before the gate of the law that was kept open only for him waits
until his end, the most intimate and general organ of relation¬
ships, the With, is only connected to you, and it disappears from
the world the moment you appear as the main person; then you
cease to be an Also, because your external appearance is immedi¬
ately accompanied by a proper name that prepares you for
becoming an individual. The With, on the other hand, is not
baptized, and disappears from the eyes of the living—including
yours. Although the With was your private reagent that shared
your distilling flask with you, your catalyst and mediator, it
remains condemned to be merely your lost surplus. You are the
Opus One> the With will perish. You will forever be spared from
thinking about it—and without thinking of what was lost, there
is no cause for reflection or thanks. Because your With consumes
itself in its existence as an organ-for-you, and disappears as soon
as it has served its purpose, there is a certain aptness in the feet
that you do not know it, and do not even know how one would
go about asking after it. If you met it in daylight—who could
promise that you would not turn away in disgust? Would you be
able to recognize a bloody sponge, a flat, reddish brown gelatinous
mass as your soul sibling from the time before time? One can be
absolutely certain: if gynecologists or midwives were to call it by
its anatomical name in front of you, it would remain the most

358/Bubbles

Figurine pendant, ceramic Neolithic period, 5th millennium BC

The Primal Companion / 359

distant It for you, and would consider it out of the question that
you had been ever entertained a relationship with it. That is why
it remains important to the end that we understand the With as
essentially nameless and devoid of appearance; we would bounce
back, probably fighting to hold back our disgust, if this spongy
something appeared to us in its visible form—this most wretched
phantom in the opera of the entrails. We would be reminded of
Sartres analysis of the slimy \le visqueux]\ upon touching this, we
would experience not an immersion in clear water, but rather a
stickiness that we would consider an obscene attack on our free¬
dom . 4 We would have to suspect ourselves of being monstrosities
if we sensed the imposition of developing a feeling of kinship
with the visually perceived With-lump. Viewed by real eyes, the
external With would infiltrate us “like a liquid seen in a night¬
mare, where all its properties are animated by a sort of life and
turn back against me .” 5 Motives of denial cannot entirely erase
the historical truth and the genetic reality, however: in its impor¬
tant period, the With was our private nymph fountain and our
sworn genius; it was more of a sibling to you than any external
sister or external brother could ever be. What it means to us is
probably demonstrated better by certain archetypal dreams and
symbolic-pictorial projections than by any anatomical represen¬
tation, and even someone who rolls up gratefully under their
quilt in bed before going to sleep has already learned more about
the With than external glances upon it ever could. In fact, beds
and their utensils—especially pillows, duvets, feather beds and
quilts—show a connection both clear and discreet to the initial
organ-for-you. In friendly inconspicuousness, these everyday
objects continue the function of the With as the original
augmenter and creator of intimate spaces for adult subjects too.

360/ Bubbles

French four-poster beds of the 18th and 19th centuries

As soon as we prepare for the night, we almost always slide into
a state in which we cannot help disposing ourselves towards a
self-augmentation in the dark in which an appropriate With-
successor will play its part. Even those who" do not believe in
angels or doppelgangers can rehearse the secrets of pre-personal
friendship with their closest sleep helpers, and whoever has no
friend can at least have a blanket. The theory of With-projections
will not least permit a psychohistorical deduction of bed cultures.

As long as the With appears and circulates in the cultural
space in the form of such free anonymous elements, sublimated
and symbolically concealed re-encounters with it are neither
impossible nor uncommon. The young man who practiced the
art of silence with his analyst over many months also seems to
be among those who knew how to summon their lost With to
a rendezvous outside of the bed. If this suspicion were correct,
the answer to the question of what role the analyst had to play

The Prlnral Companion / 361

in Grunberger$ legend would be this: he embodied the lost and
regained With of his client. During months of mute rehearsal
in feeling-With, 6 the “analysand” would have become suffi¬
ciently sure of the Withs presence to know one day that he
would henceforth be able to keep the augmenting element with
him “alone,” that is, outside of the therapeutic monadic form.
In his case, then, being cured would have meant nothing other
than the reassured reconnection with the inner prospect of the
inner companions shadow presence, which would not be lost
again so easily. To avoid distorting the With through external¬
izing de-projections and reducing it to the anatomical-material
level—which usually has a more blinding effect than the usual
never-thinking-about-it—one must seek pictorial projections
in which the With-nobject can be brought to light at an appro¬
priate level of sublimation. The elevation of the With to the
non-anatomical sublime would be complete once its pictorial
representation were able to do justice to the originally space¬
forming polarization energy of the With-Also-sphere. One can
find numerous documents of this in the symbol history of early
and advanced civilizations, not least in the field of integration
symbolisms, in particular the wide morphological cycle of trees
of life (c£ Excursus 5) and mandala figures. The most current
symbolization of psychological primary duality, however,
occurs in the mythologies of doppelgangers, twins and soul
siblings that we shall examine in their own right in the following. 7
To mark the extremes of this With-symbolism, let us first com¬
ment on two eminent models of fetal space creation: the first
gives us theological, the second artistic access to the With as a
phenomenon.

362 / Bubotes

In an account by Hildegard of Bingen from the first part of her
record of mystical visions written in 1147, Scivias , we find an
unprecedentedly sublime intrauterine-theological communion.
Hildegard famously wrote about her audio-visionary experi¬
ences in a verbal paraphrase first, then adding commentary in
additional interpretations of the images; last of all, her visions
were translated into pictorial forms by a manuscript illustrator.
The legend of the fourth vision from the first cycle of Scivias
reads as follows:

You see a most great and serene splendor, flaming, as it were,
with many eyes, with four corners pointing towards the four
parts of the world. [...] this shows the mystery of the Celestial
Majesty, which, as you see, is presented to you in this image of
great loftiness and profundity. In it appears another splendor
like the dawn, containing in itself a brightness of purple light¬
ning. [...] You see also on the earth people carrying milk in
earthen vessels and making cheese from it {...] One part is
thick, and from it strong cheeses are made. [...] And one part
is thin, and from it weak cheses are curdled; [...] one part is
mixed with corruption, and from it bitter cheeses are formed.

[...] And you see the image of a woman who has a perfect
human form in her womb. [...] And behold! By the secret
design of the Supernatural Creator that form moves with vital
motion [...]. So that a fiery globe which has no human linea¬
ments possesses the heart of that form [...] And it also touches
the persons brain; [...] and it spreads itself through all the
persons members. [...] But then this human form, in this way
vivified, comes forth from the womans womb, and changes its
color according to the movement the globe makes in that

T-e Primal Companion / 383

Hildegard of Bingen, Savins, The Creation of the
Soul, illustration from the Ruperts berg Codex

364 / Bubbles

form. |_J Many whirlwinds assail one of these globes in a

body and bow ir down to the ground. [...] But that globe,
gaining back its strength and bravely raising itself up, resists
them boldly . 8

The corresponding illustration from the Rupertsberg Codex trans¬
lates essential aspects of the vision into the language of external
visuality. The pictures longitudinal axis is cut in two by a trunk or
rope rising with curious, or perhaps alarming concreteness from
the belly of the fetus inside the mother, lying on the oval ground,
to the floating eye rhombus covered with eyes in the upper section.
If there was ever a depiction of the With protected from
anatomical de-sublimation, here is a concrete example. It seems
that the animating vis-k-vis of the child in the womb is being
directly elevated to the magical crossing in the heavens; 9 through
its eccentric umbilical cord, the fetus is vividly connected to the
sphere of the divine spirit, which manifests itself as an accumula¬
tion of pure intelligences and world-founding eyes in the upper
world. That this crossing, filled with eyes, indeed symbolizes an
emanation very close to God is shown by the first Scivias vision, in
which Hildegard perceived, directly beside the overwhelmingly
radiant shape of the Most High, “an image full of eyes on all sides,
in which, because of those eyes, 1 could discern no human form.” 10
Hildegard s vision of the creation of humans and their souls thus
conceives the With not as an intrauterine phenomenon, but rather
as a heavenly body of subjectivity connected to the fetus from a
distance through a hyper-umbilical cord or angel cable. At a par¬
ticular moment, a spherical individual soul descends from the
With on high to the child through this cord—just as if one of
the eyes at the top were separating from its heavenly ensemble

Tne tVima- Companion / 365

and entering the heart of the fetus through its navel. Thus the
pychognostic character of the fourth Scivias vision becomes
evident: it offers a complete view of human ontogenesis. While
the eccentric umbilical cord makes the intimate long-distance
connection of the fetus to its animating With in the space close to
God, the people in the oval bringing their cheese in vessels repre¬
sent the creation of mankind. To understand the cheeses as
symbols of the human body, we should recall the very old notion,
made ubiquitous in Christianity by the Book of Job, that the human
body in the mother s womb comes about no differently from cheese
in fermented milk: through thickening and curdling. Just as a solid
body concresces from liquid material in the production of cheese,
the human form grows inside the womb through the clotting of
blood. 11 This enabled Job to ask God in his accusations:

Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like
cheese? [...]

Why then did you bring me out of the womb? I wish 1
had died before any eye saw me. (Job 10:10 & 18)

But, just as not all milk curdlings produce good results, not all
instances of concrescence in the womb produce solid human bod¬
ies: Hildegard knew through her own chronic sickliness how
precarious a matter human bodily creations can be; she herself was
a typical product of “weak cheese”—though one should acknowl¬
edge that this undoubtedly has its own value, and need not be
considered a bad result a priori ; the lean is also a legitimate result
of procedures in the workshop of creation—indeed, esoteric psy¬
chologists claim, the first manufacturer often has special plans for
it, in so far as the lean ones are the better media. The only thing

366 / Bubbles

humans must avoid like damnation is becoming bitter. In Hilde-
gards model, pregnancy repeats the creation of Adam: physically
as the formation of a solid from a liquid through concrescence,
and psycho-pneumatically as the inspiration of the soul through
the descent of a spirit orb from the angelic space into the fetal
body. According to the traditional view, the latter takes place
around the middle of pregnancy—that is, at a point equated in
earlier doctrines of female wisdom with the beginning of palpable
movement in the womb. It is the orb, having descended from
close to God and been absorbed by the child’s body, that forms
the center of human destiny, even after birth; its calling is to prove
itself amid worldly opposition.

Alongside Hildegards theological vision of With-structure, any
psychological or endoscopic conception of the intrauterine partner
will seem prosaic and trivial. Even if contemporary analysts will
not be able to follow on direcdy from the details of Hildegard s
religious mindscape, they will find in her account a document
showing how high older vision discourses elevated the mysterious
togetherness of the fetus with an animating other. The umbilical
cord is more than a vein between the child and the bloody sponge
in its proximity—it forms the physical monument to the real con¬
nection of incipient life to an inflowing augmentative force. People
may parenthesize these concepts today because of their effusive
religiosity. In their musical pitch and form, however, they protect
modern researchers in this field too from the physiological idiocy
of presumed expertise in womanhood, along with its gynecological
vanguard and its pop-psychological rearguard. They indicate the
necessary level for any discussion of intrauterine bipolarity if the
risk of an inappropriate de-sublimation is to be eliminated.

The Primal Corncarlon / 367

Equally valid formulations from our own time would be
expected most in the field of fantastic visual art, where psycho¬
logical depth symbolisms were developed into visual figurations.
One eminent recent example of this can be found in some mys¬
terious images of trees by the surrealist painter Rene Magritte,
especially a work from 1964 with the title La reconnaissance
infinie (Infinite Recognition). Magrittes painting, a small-
format gouache, shows two small gentlemen wearing hats and
long dark coats, viewed from behind, in the middle of a tall,
heart-shaped tree with dense, sponge-like, fine-veined leaves;
they seem like twins, and are standing in the upper third of the
foliage—the heart area of the tree, as it were. Their presence in
the tree gives the impression of being completely natural, even
though the two figures seem both small and a little lost within
it. The picture could be read as a cryptic treatise on belonging
together: what these two very similar figures, standing amid the
leaves like miniature Chaplins, have to do with each other
remains as unclear as the reason for their association with the
tree—and yet these two unexplained circumstances seem inter¬
woven; the one unknown comments on the other. The title of
the painting does not tell us whether this infinite recognition—
which could also mean infinite gratitude—takes place between
the two men, or rather refers to their position inside the tree. In
both cases, this recognitive thanking or thinking refers to the
tree itself: in the one case as the discovery of similarity between
the two figures, in which case they would be standing in a tree
of knowledge, and in the other case as a testimony to the affili¬
ation of both with the tree as such, which would then have to
be understood as a tree of life. Thus Magrittes symbolic image
discourse, though entirely based on the intrinsic artistic value of

368/BubDtea

Ren6 Magritte, La reconnaissance infinie

the forms used, enters a dialogue with old Judeo-Christian
mythological traditions. If one concedes that the motif of the
tree of life is an original With-symbol, Magrittes enigmatic
picture forms a direct introduction to the field of archaic

Partial Companion / 369

bipolarity: the place in the tree is in fact that from which both
infinite recognition and unlimited gratitude originate. At the
same time, the tree symbol discreetly and sublimely maintains
the antonym of the With, ensuring its presence in visual percep¬
tion without betraying it to anatomical triviality.

This applies even more to the famous series of paintings
entitled La voix du sang (The Voice of Blood), in which Magritte
meditated on the motif of the wonder tree between 1948 and
the early 1960s. In one picture dominated by deep sea blue and
greenish black hues, whose format of 90 x 110 cm reinforces its
suggestive presence, the mythical motifs of the tree of life and
the tree of knowledge are combined into one. The picture itself
seems to dictate a perception in three stages of viewing: first of
all, in the center, the trunk with the two flaps catches the eye.
The compartments stand open like windows in an Advent
calendar, displaying naive symbols of happiness—the closed
white ball and the illuminated house with its promising interior.
It does not seem out of the question that a third window, almost
concealed by the leaves, might open above the ball in this festive
tree. The first glance has scarcely moved away from the figural
attractions in the middle before it is drawn upwards, in a second
act, to the archetypal branches of the giant tree, which fills out
the entire upper half of the picture with its dark, irrefutable
authority. The foliage, in its detailed, spongy-spheric structure
and with the blue background shining through it, forms an
organic antithesis of the geometric-artificial figures in the
trunks interior. Although the picture seems devoid of people, it
actually discusses a humanly significant contrast: that between
the organic form represented by the branches and leaves and the
intellectually idealized and constructed figures of the house and

370/ Bubbles

Rene Magrirte, La voix dti sang

The Pirnr?

Ccmoarion i 371

Rene Magritte, La voix du sang, detail

372 / Bubbles

ball. But how does the voice of blood become audible? It sounds
as the call of the tree of life itself: it is this voice that mediates
between the geometric fetuses in the tree trunk and the nourishing
foliar sphere. The tree, which bears the ball and the house in its
“womb,” is obviously not concerned with fruits of its own
species and genus. As the tree of life and knowledge in one, it
does not produce its own and organically similar offshoots, but
rather its opposite: the anorganic intellectual forms that are
significant for thinking subjects because they testify to their
own constructiveness. Hence Magrittes tree stands for a With
that, as vegetative nature, supports intellectual inhabitants. The
tree of life is pregnant with houses, balls and human subjectivity.
That is why the intrauterine poles are clearly contrasted inside
the Advent tree: in the trunk the Also, the geometric image
fetuses, and in the organic foliage the With, the life-giving
creature of closeness. As for the third view of the picture, it is
only permitted once our observation has resigned in the face of
the impenetrably open secrets of the tree of life. At some point
one looks past the trees intimate sphere into the distance, which
surprisingly transpires as a genuinely liberated zone: a deep river
landscape opens up, with mountain ranges on the left and an
open plain on the right. It is a landscape without the burden of
symbols or the gravity of riddles. In order to reach it, one would
have to break out of the sonic circle in the foreground, in which
the voice of blood rules over everything. Would it be entirely
mistaken, then, to suppose that the artist himself is hiding in
this blue distant space, from where, a little willfully and without
faith in his own symbols, he presents the figures in the fore¬
ground to his viewers like false riddles?

The Primal Companion / 373

What conclusions can we draw from these symbolic representa¬
tions of the With about its structure and mode of being? These
images certainly assign the intimate spatial partner a powerful
status in the real domain. Whether one imagines it as a crossing
close to God, full of eyes and soul orbs, or as an Advent tree of
life and knowledge, both projections feature the With as an
autonomously augmentative authority that would give the ego
cause for warm and grateful remembrance. Nonetheless, it
remains a justified question whether the With can genuinely
only become visible in such sublime projections and indirect
manifestations. Does the ‘other organ” really depend on being
remembered purely in sublime paraphrases? Can one only speak
of it like the invisible monarch of a neighbor state, whose good¬
will we depend upon for our own fortune even though we could
never welcome him on an official visit? Is there no way to receive
the intimate other than as a guest, without underestimating him
or losing sight of him through improper superelevations? If it
was an indispensable partner in our cave life, what prevents us
from checking whether the other is appearing at the same time
when we leave the cave? If the With has shared that most per¬
sonal cave with you—not as a ghost and imaginary nightshade,
but as a real, indispensable, bodily second party—it is inevitable
that it will leave the cave together with you once it is time for
you to make that move.

In the case of that move, the above arrangement with the
twofold observer inside and before the cave seems a useful one:
the outside witness would have to be capable of saying without
further ado whether my With had come out into the open
along with me, the first class arrival. In that case, we would not
have to worry that we had fallen prey to the misguided prose of

374 / Bubbles

a gynecological view from above; it would then not be a matter of
inappropriately dragging inner truths outside and de-sublimating
them through crude classifications. The outside observer would
have no more to tell than the things which must come to light of
their own accord in the increasingly drastic and sublime natal
drama at the cave exit. So what would the outside observer put
on record about what came with you? Would he tell you outright
that you had come alone? Or would he confirm that there were
two? It is precisely at this moment of choice, however, that the
observer we are hoping for will usually disappoint us. Only now
can we judge the full extent of our quandary: of all the people we
know, did any of them ever have a chance to consult their mid¬
wife or family doctor? And how perfectly normal it seems that
among millions of people, not one interrogates their own
mother about such things. We ask no questions from the start,
as if the impossibility of receiving answers were a proven fact.
While it is certain that an outside observer would have witnessed
the newborn and its With first hand if they had seen the light of
day successively, it is also difficult to verify after the event, as the
witnesses can virtually never be consulted. If the With had
emerged at the same time as I did, I would no longer be able to
assure myself of its existence—unless I found ways to break
through the wall of silence built around me and my augmenter
as soon as my life began. If the With ever existed, I am clearly the
one who is meant to be fundamentally separated from it.

A wall of silence—indeed: the more clear or contoured the
intrauterine monochrome becomes, the more stubbornly it
resists description. Even if I allow myself to be consumed more
and more by the assumption that back then, in the exquisite
cave, there were always two of us, all the traces left by my life his-

\ 'e P'tnat Gonnpanion / 375.

tory point me exclusively to myself. So was I deceived from the
start? Was my With secretly removed and exchanged, like a Kas-
par Hauser among the organs? Could it still be alive, held captive
at some other location, underground, neglected and lonely, like
the unfortunate Kaspar, the phantom of Karlsruhe, the child of
Europe in his Franconian dungeon? And if it were dead, and I an
orphan, why did it not receive a proper burial, even if it were
only in a cemetery for organs related to us? Who decided that we
should be beings who neither seek nor visit our lost With—not
on our birthdays and not on All Souls' Day? What is the sense of
this With-lessness to which every person is condemned today, as
if by general arrangement? What could be done to circumvent
this perfect alliance of silence, which managed to turn the With
into the absolute anti-topic?

There is, at least, one detail from the whispering of midwives
that enters the general publics knowledge: one can only consid¬
er a birth successfully completed when the afterbirth has also left
the womb without residue. This is where the conspiracy of
silence against the With has its weak point: in truth, obstetricians
know that there are always two units which reach the outside in
successful births. The child, which naturally receives the lions
share of the attention, never emerges from the cave alone—it is
followed by an inevitable organic supplement known in old
France as arrifre-faix or delivrance : the afterbirth, the after-bur-
den, deliverance. Only birth and afterbirth together meet the
requirements of a complete delivery. Since around 1700, the
medical term ‘placenta' has become the standard word for the
afterbirth in German and the other European national languages.
The word is a learned derivation from the Latin word for flat
cake or flat bread, placenta^ which itself comes from the synony-

3767 Bubfees

mous Greek plakous , whose accusative form is plakounta\ this, in
turn, is related to Palatschinke> the Austro-Hungarian word for
pancake. The terms metaphorical roots clearly lie in the imagi¬
native field of the old bakers craft; its place in life was in the field
kitchen of the Roman legions. In fact, Aristotle had already com¬
pared the relationship between the womb and the child with that
between the oven and the bread dough. For him, the child’s stay
within the mother meant a creation through concretion or a
solidification of the soft. According to earlier traditions of mid¬
wifery, however, the dough baking in the maternal oven was not
so much the child itself as that mysterious placental cake on
which the child evidently fed in utero until it was ready to see the
light of the world and drink its milk. 12 Thus the pregnant womb
was always imagined by mothers and midwives in earlier times as
a twofold workshop: a placenta bakery and an intimate child
kitchen. While the child itself is prepared in the uterine caul¬
dron, the mothers second work, the flat cake, ensures the
appropriate nutrition during the longest night. It therefore
comes as the second delivery at birth, and is even referred to in
recent gynecology as secundinae mulieris . Where notions of a
magical uterine kitchen predominated, it goes without saying
that the placenta, as the mothers opus secundum , an essential co-
phenomenon of every birth was received with great esteem, even
numinous awe. Every newborn child was given something
unspoken on its way in the form of the afterbirth that seemed—
especially for the female community in the district of birth—to
be fatefully connected to the child’s life. Often the afterbirth was
viewed as its double, which is why the placenta could not pos¬
sibly be treated with indifference. It had to be guarded like an
omen and brought to safety like a symbolic sibling of the

Tha Primal Conpanon / 377

newborn. Above all, it had to be ensured that no animals or
strangers gained control of it. Often the child s father buried it in
the cellar or under the staircase so that the household would
profit from its fertile power, and sometimes bams or stables were
also used as burial sites. 13 In some cases the placenta was buried
in the garden or the field, where it was meant to decay as undis¬
turbed as possible. It was a widespread custom to bury it under
young fruit trees; one factor in this may have been the morpho¬
logical connection between the placental tissue and the root
systems of trees, as a sort of analogy magic. The habit of burying
the umbilical cord under rose trees also stems from analogy-
magical ideas. 14 In Germany, pear trees were chosen for the
placentas of boys, and apple trees for those of girls. If fruit trees
were planted on top of buried placentas, however, these were
supposed to be sympathetically connected to the children for the
duration of their lives; it was thought that the child and its tree
would prosper together, fall ill together and die together. In other
traditions the placenta was hung up to dry in hidden corners of
the house, for example fireplaces—a custom that supposedly still
persists erratically in Northern Portugal. In many parts of
Europe, dried and ground placenta was considered an impeccable
remedy for numerous ailments; it is already mentioned in the
Corpus Hippokraticum , and was praised from the days of the
medical school of Salerno to the seventeenth century by doctors
and pharmacists, most of all as a cure for liver spots, birthmarks
and acute growths, as well as epilepsy and strokes. As far as gyne¬
cological disorders and fertility problems are concerned, these
seemed to demand unequivocally the use of placenta powders.
The placenta was also ascribed exceptional significance for the
reanimation of lifeless newborns; people thought that the

.378 / Bubbles

^ = <HI Ye
= $ Yong

7 ^ " Dae
j£ = % Wang

M - n Tae

1^7 = ^ Shih

Proper name

Great King

Placenta

Chamber

Grave of the placenta of a prince, the later eighth king of the Korean Yi Dynasty
(1468-1469). It is located in front of the national museum of Jeonju, the capital
of North Jeolla Province. The inscriptions on the tortoise stele (tortoise « symbol
of longevity) are explained beside the picture.

afterbirth, which was applied as a warm compress, would have a
restorative effect—one last time—on the unfortunate creatures
that had emerged from the struggle of birth in a state of apparent
death. The travelers of the sixteenth century did not neglect to
express their wonder or shock that among some peoples, for
example indigenous tribes of Brazil, it was customary to eat the
placenta directly following birth—as can also be observed among
the majority of mammals. Among the Yakuts, the placenta meal
is a ritual that the child’s father is obliged to perform for his
friends and relatives. In Europe too, it was a widespread belief
until the eighteenth century that it was advantageous for nursing
mothers to eat at least a small piece of fresh placenta. A cookbook
belonging to Hildegard of Bingen contains recipes for beef olives
stuffed with placenta. As late as 1768, a midwifery handbook
passionately discussed the question of whether Adam ate the pla-
centa following the birth of his offspring. 15 In Pharaonic Egypt,

The P?*ma Companion / 379

the afterbirth was assigned great cultic importance—especially in
the case of royal births. The Pharaohs placenta was considered
the incarnation of his outer soul; it was described as his “secret
helper” and occasionally appeared in pictures. Impressive details
of elaborate placenta-cultic institutions have survived in ancient
Egyptian sources. 16 The Pharaohs placenta was not infrequently
mummified after birth and preserved as a talisman for his entire
life; this “bundle of life” had protective and supportive effects—it
was considered the kings mystic ally. The placenta mummy was
looked after and guarded by temple priests with great reverence.
The ancient Egyptian custom of carrying the pharaohs placenta
ahead of the ruler in processions was upheld from the fourth
millennium BC to the Ptolemaic age; later flag cults were derived
from it. 17 During the fourth, fifth and sixth dynasties there was a
special office whose representatives acted as “openers of the royal
placenta” It was presumably their task to open the Pharaohs
“bundle of life” symbolically after his death so that the outer soul
would be freed for the journey to the underworld; at the same
time, this farewell ritual made way for the successor to the throne.
The placenta mummy was then either interred in special alabaster
urns or placed in the kings tomb together with his embalmed
body as a cap or pillow. An x-ray of a royal mummy in the British
Museum shows a placenta bound to the back of the corpses
head with bandages. In some parts of North Africa, the custom
of wearing leather pouches containing placental or umbilical
amulets throughout ones life is apparently still upheld today. In
the Old Testament too, one finds traces of the notion that the
placenta, as a little bag of life, held a second soul or alter ego
of humans:

380/ Bubbles

Pharaonic Procession with placental standards

Even though someone is pursuing you to take your life, the
life of my master will be bound securely in the bundle of the
living by the Lord your God. 18 But the lives of your enemies he
will hurl away as from the pocket of a sling. (1 Samuel 25:29)

In Korean tradition it was usual to give up the placenta to the sea,
or to burn it together with rice and millet husks and scatter the
ashes on paths for good luck. Numerous cultures have the cus¬
tom of hanging up placentas in trees; occasionally the afterbirth
is dressed in a cotton shirt, girded with a rope, given headgear
like a human being and fixed to the branches of trees. The four
main methods of placenta care—burial, hanging up, burning
and immersion in water—correspond to the elements, to which,
as forces of creation, that which is theirs is returned. Among
northern peoples, placental ash was considered a powerful magical

The Primal Ccnparnon / 331

cure. If the placenta is thrown into a pit latrine, on the other
hand, a folk superstition—most widespread in old France—has
it that the woman will suffer cancer and a miserable death after
her menopause.

Whatever the nature of the ritual and cultic procedures of
placenta care may have been; in almost all older cultures, the inti¬
mate correspondence between birth and afterbirth was beyond
doubt. Dealing with the child's placental double in an inattentive
fashion would universally have been considered a curse-worthy
neglect of the most necessary duty. It seems as if the beginnings
of a disenchantment of the entire perinatal field, and thus also a
de-sanctification of placenta awareness, only appeared with the
advent of Hellenistic medicine; but even these tendencies—as
the example of Hildegard s vision shows—were not sufficient to
trigger a general de-sublimation of the fetus-placenta alliance in
post-Hellenistic European birthing practices.

It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century,
starting from the courtly and upper class sphere and its doctors,
that a radical devaluation of the placenta took place. From that
point on, obstetric literature standardized an attitude of disgust
and embarrassment among childbearers and witnesses alike to that
macabre object which comes out of the mother “afterwards ” In an
epoch-making example of disgust training, middle-class women—
but also poets and fathers from the enlightened parts of
society—unlearned how to keep a space open for the afterbirth in
the cultural imaginary realm. For the intimate With, an era of
unconditional exclusion began. Now the placenta became the
organ that does not exist; in the light, what had been the authority
of a first There-is becomes something that is itself absolutely
without existence. The innermost second element becomes the

382 / Bubbles

unconditionally vanished, the repulsive reject par excellence . It was,
in fact, only from that time onwards that those conducting births,
whether in hospital or at home, became accustomed to treating the
placenta as a waste product. Now it was increasingly discarded as
carrion and “disposed of” as garbage—which means destroyed. In
the twentieth century, the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries
developed an interest in placental tissue because it came into con¬
sideration as a raw material for remedies and regenerative facial
masks; this interest also informs the more or less blind consensus
that clinics are the correct place for births; for where if not in
clinics can one set up such collection points? If the placentas are
not used for pharmaceutical purposes, it can happen that they are

The Primal Cqmca'xr / 383

granulated together with stillborn fetuses and employed as
combustive agents in garbage incinerators—that is the current
state of technology in the German capital after the reunification.

Admittedly, it would be an exaggeration to say that the pla¬
centa has been thrown in the garbage in modern times. In the
new world of unaccompanied single persons, the organ that
prepares us to count onwards from two and travel here from yon¬
der will, officially, never really have existed. The subject is
isolated retroactively, and now portrayed even in its prenatal
being as a first without a second. There are some indications that
modern individualism could only enter its intense phase in the
second half of the eighteenth century, when the general clinical
and cultural excommunication of the placenta began. The medical
establishment took it upon itself to ensure, like a gynecological
inquisition, that the correct belief in unaccompanied birth was
firmly anchored in all discourses and emotional dispositions.
Bourgeois-individualist positivism established—against weak
resistance from exponents of soul-partnership Romanticism—
the radical, imaginary solitary confinement of individuals in the
womb, the cot and their own skin throughout society. Robbed of
the second element, all single humans immediately became
mothers, and directly after that a totalitarian nation that reaches
through its schools and armies for the isolated children. The
founding of civil society began an age of false alternatives, in
which the only choice individuals had was ostensibly that
between reveling solitarily in the bosom of nature and embarking
on potentially fatal power adventures with their peoples. It is no
coincidence that one finds the master thinker of regression into
absorptive nature or into the pathos-laden national state, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, as a charming and grotesque figure at the

384/ Bubbles

portal to the structurally modern, individualistic-holistic world.
Rousseau was the inventor of the friendless human, who could
only conceive of the augmentative other as either a direct
maternal nature or a direct national totality . 19 With him began the
age of the last men, who are not ashamed to appear as products
of their milieus and isolated examples of social-psychological
laws. That is why, since Rousseau, social psychology has been the
scientific form of contempt for humanity.

Where, on the other hand, as in antiquity and popular tradi¬
tions, a space was left open for the souls double in the cultural
imaginary, people could—up to the threshold of modernity—
assure themselves that they were not directly connected either to
their mothers, ‘society” or their “own” people; rather, they
remained primarily connected throughout their lives to an inner¬
most second, the true ally and genius of their particular
existence. Its highest formulation shines out from the Christian
commandment to obey God more than humans. That means: no
human is simply a “case,” because each one is a secret—the secret
of an augmented loneliness. In ancient times, the placental
double could also take refuge effortlessly among the ancestors
and household spirits. The archaic, intimate means in itself
affords the subject distance from the two primary forces of obses¬
sion that become manifest in the Modem Age: obtrusive mothers
and totalitarian collectives. But where, as in the most recent part
of the Modern Age, the With-space is annulled and withdrawn
from the start through the elimination of the placenta, the indi¬
vidual increasingly falls prey to the manic collectives and total
mothers—and, in their absence, to depression. From that point
on, the individual—especially the male one—is driven ever
deeper into the fatal choice between an autistically defiant

The Primal Companion /365

descent into loneliness and devourment by obsession communities,
whether in pairs or larger groups. On the way into apparent
willfulness, one arrives at something else: the human without a
protective spirit, the individual without an amulet, the self
without a space. If individuals do not succeed in augmenting
and stabilizing themselves in successfully practiced loneliness
techniques 20 —artistic exercises and written soliloquies, for
example—they are predestined to be absorbed by totalitarian
collectives. For the individual whose double disappeared in the
garbage always has good reason to prove to himself that he was
right to survive without his With, rather than keeping his inti¬
mate other company in the garbage.

Indeed: since people stopped burying the intimate With in
the house or under trees and roses, all individuals are latent
traitors who have a guilt without a concept to deny; with their
resolutely independent lives, they deny that they are constantly
repeating the betrayal of their most intimate companion in their
remorselessly autonomous being. Sometimes they think they are
discovering a depth of their own when they feel lonely; in doing
so, however, they overlook the fact that even their loneliness is
only half their own, the smaller half of a loneliness whose larger
half the thrown-away With took upon itself. The lonely modern
subject is not the result of its self-choice, but rather a fission
product from the informal separation of birth and afterbirth. Its
positively willful being is tainted by a fault to which it will never
admit: that it rests on the elimination of the most intimate pre¬
object. Its own singular value was purchased with the descent of
the second element into the garbage. Because the ally disappeared
in the refuse, the subject is an ego without a double: an inde¬
pendent, unrepeatable meteor. In relation to its navel, the released

3867 Bubbles

individual finds, instead of the With-space, not the addressable
other but distracting business and nothingness. If the subject were
to practice what one contemptuously terms “navel contemplation”
in the West, it would only find its own unrelated knot. It would
never comprehend that for its entire life, the severed cord in the
imaginary and psycho-sonorous realms inevitably points across
into a With-space. In terms of its psychodynamic source, the indi¬
vidualism of the Modem Age is a placental nihilism.

In .modern urban delivery rituals, both in clinics and homes,
the imaginary and practical equation of placenta and nothingness
has largely established itself; the only exceptions to the general
trend were small islands of tradition where traces of older generation
psychology and doctrines of female wisdom survived almost
unnoticed. In more recent times, a resistance to clinical posi¬
tivism and its cultural superstructure developed from these
islands, not least in the form of neo-archaic obstetric practices. In
these, the severing of the umbilical cord in particular regained a
certain ritual meaning and symbolic accentuation. Where such
aspects are absent, it is usually the umbilical cord s opposite pole,
the placenta, that is perceived as a waste product from which a
separation cannot have any significance for the subject. One can
even suppose that for the majority of modern mothers, it is not
even clear in physiological terms what is actually severed when
umbilical cords are cut off—there is, in general, merely a vague
notion of the fact that the child lies on one side and the mother
on the other . 21 In truth, the fetus and its placenta, ascending
together from the underworld, are a couple like Orpheus and
Eurydice; and, although Eurydice is destined to be lost through
the vis maior , the modes of her separation are not insignificant.
Obstetricians and midwives must know that when they perform

The Primal Gonfmon / 387

the cut that is constitutive for the subject, they must, as it were,
adopt an explanatory and clarifying attitude towards the child as
mature givers of separation. They must understand themselves as
cultural officiants who convey this cut as an original symbolic
gift, indeed as an initiation into the symbolic world as such.

In terms of its dramatic content, what one generally calls
“cutting the cord” is the introduction of the child into the sphere
of ego-forming clarity. To cut means to state individuality with
the knife. The one who performs the cut is the first separation-
giver in the subjects history; through the gift of separation, he
provides the child with the stimulus for existence in the external
media. The obstetrician can only act as a separation-giver,
however, if he himself, in mature circumspection, has both poles
of the designated separatee in view. If Orpheus is to be delivered
in the correct, adult fashion, then Eurydice too must be bid
farewell in a sensitive and adult manner. Being able to act
towards the child as an adult essentially means nothing other
than being able to give the right separation at the right time.
Modern individuals who have themselves already grown up in
the regime of placental nihilism, however, have lost their compe¬
tence to perform adult gestures. Where they should give the first
separation with positive clarity, they normally seek infantile-
nihilistic refuge in gestures of shameful disposal and hurried aid
to disappearance. They act as garbage disposal men for Eurydice.
Hastily, informally and cluelessly, they exterminate the afterbirth
and destroy in Orpheus the beginnings of the melody that would
be born from his free asking after the other part. Hence the
muses primal scene is covered up among the badly delivered
subjects of modernity; the freedom to lament the lost other is
smothered by dullness and unceremoniousness. With this, culture

388/Bubbles

Votive to a mother deity, presumably from a shrine in Veii, Southern Italy, terracotta

The Prirral Conpan on / 389

squanders its first scene in the individual. How will the child ever
learn that angels only go so that archangels may come in?

Of course, the umbilical cord is still tied off everywhere in
modern times, in all imaginable ways; to this day, the navel on
the subjects body constitutes the hieroglyph of its drama of indi¬
vidualization. But the navel has lost its idea, its melody, its
question. The modern navel is a knot of resignation, and its
owners have no use for it. They do not understand that it is the
trace of Eurydice, the monument to her withdrawal and demise.
Originally, it is the source of everything that will be spoken or
intoned with decent resolve. Using the symbolically living body,
it testifies to the possibility of leaving behind blood communions
in order to cross over to the world of breath, drinks and words—a
sphere, then, that will one day, in the most favorable case, develop
into table fellowships and reconciled societies. In modernity, even
poets scarcely know that mature language is the music of separa¬
tion: to speak means to sing through ones navel. In recent time,
only Rilke seems to have touched the deep language pole:

Be dead in Eurydice, always—climb, with more song,

climb with more praise, back up into pure relation.

{Sonnets to Orpheus y Second Part, no. 13) 22

Our requiem for the lost organ thus ends with an additional
demand for clarity. Thinking the With first of all means deci¬
phering the hieroglyph of separation from it, namely the navel. If
the attempt to renew psychology by philosophical means proves
successful, its first project should be a hermeneutics of the navel—
or, to put it somewhat Greekly and metaphysically: an
omphalodicy. Just as theodicy was the justification of God in the

390/Bubbles

lace of the world s failures* omphalodicy is the justification of
language, which constantly wants to go across to the other, in the
lace of the severed umbilical cord and its trace on ones own body.

Among the few authors who have commented on the navel
as an existential engram, the French psychoanalyst Fran<;oise
Dolto deserves special attention for her theory of navel castration
{castration ombilicale ). Dolto has pointed out that the acquisition
of a navel means far more than simply a banal surgical episode
which takes place during an unexperienced early phase of human
life. In speaking of umbilical castration, she underscores the
hypothesis that cutting the cord constitutes a first culture-founding
gesture acted out on the infant body. Dolto speaks of the child’s
body like a passport that should contain the description “navel¬
castrated” in the section “particular features.” Her choice of
words becomes more understandable if one takes into account
that in the French psychoanalytical tradition, the term “castra¬
tion” is used to refer to personality-forming separations, denials
and prohibitions. It stems unmistakably from the theory of the
Oedipus Complex, in which the child—in the orthodox analytical
view—must learn to become free from its own generation for
later genital partners through a thoroughly internalized renun¬
ciation of the forbidden intra-familial love object, namely the
mother or father. Symbolic genital castration—that is, the ban on
incest—separates the future genital subject from its immediate
longing for the obvious first love partner. Only a thoroughly
internalized castration can teach the genital subjects, their desire
now curtailed, as it were, to steer clear of the ultimate forbidden
erotic goal; their libido is thus extraverted and directed extra-
familially; it is freed from the comfortable, yet unbearably
burdensome obsession with the nearest, most logical first love

The Primal Comoarior / 391

object. Thus the abstention from the absolutely forbidden would
be the start of the subjects later erotic availability; it creates the
conditions in which the subjects, in more mature days, can
choose a non-mother or non-father as an erotic partner. But even
if one acknowledges a certain plausibility to this clearly overly
simple and optimistic model—why should the severing of the
umbilical cord already have a castrative meaning? Like other
psychoanalysts of the French school, Dolto uses the term
“castration”—sometimes, it must be said, with a hint of helpless¬
ness—as a technical synonym for progressive weanings, precisely
in the pre- and extra-genital field; she occasionally places it in
quotation marks, undoubtedly aware that it may have an alien¬
ating or even repellent effect on impartial listeners and readers.
But as the author, for all her self-assurance, seems bound more to
the school than the public communication community, she
repeats the castration formula like a pledge of allegiance to ana¬
lytical scholastics, even though one could easily invent other, less
provocative terms for the matter in question, namely the symbol-
creating emancipation of the child from its obsolete first partners
in desire.

It is not our aim here to poke fun at the outmoded termino¬
logical frocks of an improperly school-based and subservient
psychoanalysis. In truth, this language convention is based on a
very serious, secularistically and scientifically concealed reli¬
gious motif: like the Jewish practice of circumcision, castration
reminds us that humans, if they are to be autonomous, capable
of culture and obedient to rules, cannot be owned solely by the
impulses of their momentary libido; they should break away
from the limited and impatient enjoyment of primitive goods in
order to ascend to an unrestricted and patient joy over objects of

392 / Bubbles

more mature sympathy. This corresponds precisely to one of the
Jewish religions constitutive ideas: freedom under the law. Only
through a series of successful separations, sublimations or indeed
“castrations”—at the respective developmental stages of orality,
anality and genitality—can the child that lives forwards unmuti¬
lated master the free use of the world. The properly separated,
desiring, fertile subject can—correcdy understood—rule over the
earth. Even in its terminological peculiarities, classical psycho¬
analysis still advocates a pathos-dominated concept of adult,
properly disenchanted life. Complete adulthood, it believes,
comes about through a curriculum of world-disclosing renunci¬
ations. In renunciation, wisdom and freedom coincide;
abnegation makes the subject fit for culture and community and
anchors it in living language games among adults who are capable
of cooperation. With its doctrine of liberating abstinence,
psychoanalysis in the French style thus produced a suggestive
reformulation of Jewish spirituality and its Christian offshoots—
a formulation that is the more suited to missionary attempts the
less the protagonists realize what line of succession they are
thinking and acting in.

According to Dolto’s conviction, these separating “castra¬
tions” are not merely symbolic actions, but themselves
symbol-creating or “symboligenic” acts; they set the infantes on
the way to language. Symbol formations serve the de-fascination
of the subject and its opening-up to the wider world; they eman¬
cipate it from the obsessive directness of relation to the first
milieu and its libidinous content. If, consequently, we are already
to consider the cutting of the umbilical cord a form of castration,
it is because for the child, this coincides with the imposition of
forgoing the comfortably immediate blood communion with the

I*'’-© PriiTial Cqmpaiioh / 393

mother and accepting the more hazardous and variable circum¬
stances of oral nourishment and external embraces. Drinking,
whether from a breast or a substitute thereof, is a communion
that replaces a communion. In this—and only this—sense, it
constitutes a step towards the symbolic. Anyone drinking from
an external source is at least free from the longing for an
exchange of blood—unless they drink, as some alcoholics do, to
the point of self-liquefaction and the dissolution of the worlds
contours. Milk and equivalent drinks replace the oldest sanguine
communion. Because it is in the nature of the symbolic to
replace earlier elements with later ones and material media with
subtler ones, the child’s progression out of uterine immediacy
can be viewed as a castration in the precise technical sense—all
the more so because Fran^oise Dolto leaves no doubt that the
infant itself must be ascribed some “understanding” of the neces¬
sity of these progressive transitions. This becomes more plausible
if one considers that the open-air newborn not only exchanges
blood communion for breathing, but also masters a post-uterine
use of the voice; this gives it the power to make itself insistently
heard by its mother in case of need. The voice secures the dis¬
pensability of the blood community because it “signifies” the
summonability of milk. Being outside means being able to call; I
call, therefore I am; from this moment on, existence means
existing within the success space of ones own voice. Thus sym¬
bol genesis, like ego formation, begins with voice “formation”;
Thomas Macho and others have righdy assigned properties of a
vocal umbilical cord to the voice that leads to the mother s ears. 23
The physical umbilical bond must indeed have a successor to
ensure that unbound life too will remain under the sign of
attachment. 24 The development of symbolic abilities thus

394 / Buboles

presupposes a continuum principle; this articulates the demand
for the earlier not simply to be lost in the substitution process,
but rather functionally preserved and replaced by its expanded
form at the next stage* Successful symbol formation in the mental
process occurs through conservative-progressive compromises.

If, however, no acceptable new balances of desire are offered
ro replace the lost older ones, the subject comes up against an
insurmountable obstacle and is shattered by its lack of desire.
Now the good world becomes unattainable. No progression can
occur with the frustrated infant, and its life, which had ventured
this far, is now trapped; it is too late to turn back, and there are
no longer adequate transitional aids in sight for it to go forwards*
Thus a rigid continuum is inscribed upon its organism; a white
point grows in the symbolic field, the pain remains imprisoned
in non-linguistic bodily processes, and the pressure to live is inca¬
pable of transforming itself into an expressive libido. From this
perspective, Dolto’s view that the missed or poorly communicated
umbilical separation can become an early catastrophe of symbol
formation is well-founded. For then the subject will not expe¬
rience the productive game of resonance with its mother that
would convince it of the advantage of being born. Hence the
phrase “umbilical castration” refers not only to the act that brings
about the liberating division of mother and child with the knife
or the scissors; it stands for the entire effort of converting the
child to the belief that it is advantageous for it to be born. 25 On
this level, “castrating” successfully would mean establishing a
store of good experiences of resonance in the outside world with
lifelong effects* The ability to believe in promises rests on this
pre-linguistic hoard of primary impressions that confirm the
attainability of the world; what is usually termed “faith” is simply

T«e Rifnal CoTipanion / 396

another word for a pre-linguistically established trust in lan¬
guage. This grows exclusively in the hothouse of successful
communions; whoever lives in it constantly witnesses the advan¬
tage of speaking and of listening to the spoken. Perhaps language
only managed to become such a species-wide anthropogonic
factor because it articulates the siren force that ties us to life?
What could be a more powerful advertisement for human life
than passing on the advantage of being able to speak to the
speechless who are on the way to language? Where the speakers
do not succeed in convincing the not-yet-speakers, the aban¬
doned subject develops leanings towards going on a primal strike
against the disappointing outside and its deaf, tiresome and
superfluous signs; the ungreeted, unseduced and unenlivened
are—rightly, one is inclined to say—agnostic towards language
and cynical about the idea of communion. They do not move
into the house of being in the first place. For them, language
remains the epitome of counterfeit money; communication is
nothing but the forgers' attempt to bring their own duds into
circulation along with all the others.

396 /Buboles

Excursus 5

The Black Plantation

A Note on Trees of Life and
Enlivenment Machines

And the leaves on the tree
arc for the healing of the nations.

— Revelation 22:2

As individuals, human beings are constituted by a separating
cut that does not usually remove them from the mother, but
certainly forever from their anonymous twin. It is to be expected,
then, that the individual, as a de-coupled, de-siblinged and
uprooted residual subject, will experience the formation of a
psychological and symbolic navel alongside the physical one—
or, more precisely, an umbilical field on which memory traces
from the formative phase of placental supplementation remain
inscribed. The incipient subject can, it seems, only develop with
integrity if it is able to connect to the reserve of an intimately-
partnered parallel life from which it receives nourishing,
supportive and prophetic signs that assure it prosperity in
attachment and freedom. Plutarch’s ingenious idea of reciting
the life stories of great Greeks and Romans in biographical
pairings therefore holds, 26 beyond its historiographic wit, a

397

tacfl-iauuafigiim

juorttnmcTtiqiwtt

umuniiMiuttscra?

iicmuicnuquopar

tciftarerifftcfl$m

ttt ncfltftmtrq-pnir

rftefeuftpwTiafiu^

^nmurumninifta

twufiMtwMnii!H»n>

ncs.ifimurarmwit

uioitttporeraw iniw

lunonotswiui irnift

onbus-

The seven-chambered uterus of medieval gynecology as an occult hybrid tree.
From Guido da Vigcvano, Anatomia designata per Jiguras, Paris, 1345

398 / Boobies

religion-philosophical and depth-psychological potential that
can be revealed as soon as one applies the principle of bioi
paralleloi not to two analogous human lives, but rather to the
manifest life of an individual and the occult or virtual life of its
original companion. Among countless variations in popular
notions, one finds the idea that there must be spiritual double
or magical, vegetative parallel life, in particular the trees of life
mentioned above with reference to works by Ren6 Magritte. As
a rule, the planting of such trees takes place directly after the
birth of a child, usually with fruit trees, and not infrequently in
the place where the child’s umbilical cord or placenta was
buried, normally in the immediate vicinity of the house of
birth. Martin Luther’s famous saying about the apple tree that
would have to be planted even if one knew that the world
would end tomorrow can only be understood through this idea
of alliance: a human is undoubtedly more closely tied to its tree
of life than the two of them are to the rest of the world.

The mythology of the tree of life offers the most convincing
and widespread way out of a dilemma that is constitutive for all
cultures: that the placental double must neither appear nor not
appear either to individuals or groups. Its special status of being
between necessary concealment and necessary acknowledgement
lends it the dark radiance of a proto-religious (mis)creadon. If
it were too readily visible, it would—viewed as a mere organ-
thing—invoke the risk of a nihilistic crisis, as it initially
remains an unreasonable expectation that humans should
imagine the conditions of their existential integrity in terms of
this superfluous and rejected lump of tissue, and yet its com¬
plete absence would abandon each of them to a state of
individualistic loneliness. One could classify cultures by how

Wi B ! ack Plantation / 399

Tree of life from the altar of abbey in Stams, Tyrol

400 / Bubclss

they solve the problem of the simultaneously forbidden and
imperative placentophany, whether through hypostases of
vitality in allied plants, the representation of the viral principle
in specific animals, especially soul birds, 27 or the allocation of
protective spirits and invisible spiritual doppelgangers—which
can, moreover, be expanded into integrative community spirits,
city gods and group geniuses. The placentophanic alliance
with the nourishing other can also be lifted into a livable sym¬
bolic form through a connection to an eminent amulet or a
figure of spiritual guidance such as a guru or great teacher.
What we call religions are essentially symbolic systems whose
purpose is to transform the intimate ally of individuals into
inner supervisors.

The case of modernity, admittedly, demonstrates the possi¬
bility of cultural climates in which the placentophanic dilemma
can no longer be articulated as such (although its latent power
becomes greater than ever), because individuals are imagined
either as creatures of freedom that do not require significant
augmentation, or as bundles of pre-personal partial energies for
which the connection to an integrative second element no
longer comes into view. In addition, modem self-supplementary
life forms have achieved the breakthrough to technical media,
and thus opened up a genuine post-human horizon. Andy
Warhol provided the classic expression of this:

So in the late 50s I started an affair with my television which
has continued to the present But I didn’t get married
until 1964 when I got my first tape recorder. My wife [...].
When I say “we” I mean my tape recorder and me. A lot of
people dont understand that. 28

Ilia Black Plantation / 401

The goddess Isis, seen here in the form of a tree, nurses the Pharaoh; from the tomb
of Thurmose III, Thebes, Valley of the Kings, 18th dynasty, 1 5th century BC

402 / Bubbles

Pre-nihilistic cultures—one could also describe them as
societies that did not possess any technical media of self-aug¬
mentation—were condemned to finding, at all costs, a mythical
answer to the following question: into what grounding alliances
should the souls of individuals and peoples be integrated? No
religious or metaphysical psychology has ever reached its goal
without being able to offer a conceptual framework for the
imperative of placental doubling. As far as this task is con¬
cerned, the Babylonian and later the Essene mythologems of
the tree of life are among the most impressive symbolic arrange¬
ments, as one finds the transcendent parallel life appearing in
doubled projections. On a figural frieze from the ninth century
BC in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Kalhu, one can make
out a series of cherub-like bird-men or winged warrior geniuses,
each of which seemingly has the task of looking after a tree of
life. Evidently the total field of the double soul is here given
visual form, with the alliance between the spiritual-anthropic
and vegetative souls becoming particularly evident. 29 It seems,
however, that the link between angel doctrines and the tree of
life model was perhaps closer than any other in the cult of the
Essenes, which the angelologist Malcolm Godwin summarizes
as follows:

Central to their belief was the Tree of Life which had seven
branches reaching to the heavens and seven roots deep in the
earth. These were related to the seven mornings and seven
nights of the week and correspond to the seven Archangels of
the Christian hierarchy. In a complex cosmology, which is both
macrocosmic and microcosmic, man is situated within the
middle of the tree suspended between heaven and earth. 30

The Black Plantation / 403

Assyrian tree of life, alabaster relief from Nirnrud, 9th century BC

Here the tree of life is not only elevated to the integrative
symbol of the sect; the spiritualistic counter-society, even more
than the imperialistic first society, clearly needs to consolidate
itself through a powerful psycho-cosmological symbol of inte¬
gration—in this case an image of the arbor vitae , which acts as
a world interior and communicating cave in one. Undoubtedly,
a sociology of community-forming deliria could find its
strongest corroborations in doctrines of this type.

When Saint Boniface felled the Donar Oak near Geismar
on his missionary offensive in 724 AD, or when the agents of
Charlemagne, under the influence of Lullus, Archbishop of
Mainz, destroyed the Irminsul at the Eresburg fortress, the

404 / Bubbles

Saxon sacred pillar thought to represent a world tree, these
gestures were more than simply expressions of the usual Chris¬
tian polemic against pagan symbols. Rather, this war against
the trees consisted of frontal attacks on the placentophanic
integrative figures of the alien society, that is, strikes against the
imaginary and participatory resources from which the rival
group had drawn the ability to create its symbolic and spheric
coherence. Anyone seeking to introduce different structures of
obedience must first replace the groups previous tape recorders.
This is also evinced by the fact that the Christians tended to
replace the toppled heathen tree symbols with their own arbor
vitae\ the cross, as the speaking wood on which death had been
defeated. The history of fighting salvation associations, which
emerge as religious peoples and ideologically virulent states, is
always also a war between trees of life. It would be mistaken to
view this simply as a trait of archaic and premodern societies,
for it is precisely mass-medial modernity that produced the
means to make giant populations froth up in synchronized
polemical deliria and violence-steeped phantasms of regeneration.
Did not one of the founding fathers of American democracy,
Thomas Jefferson, formally decree that the tree of freedom
demands to be watered with the blood of patriots in each new
generation? The call for everyone to water the communal tree
assumed an efficiently structured educational, postal, military
and media system; the nationalization of the masses under
revolutionary trees of freedom or patriotic lindens is a large-
scale psychopolitical project that has been keeping European
populations on tenterhooks since the founding of nation states.
Anyone wishing to escape from the shadow of the totalitarian
tree could only have done so by seeking refuge in opposing

The Biack Piarlslion / 405

The ash tree Yggdrasil as the world tree, from Northern Antiquities

406 / Bub&les

media: the only protection against the total peoples community
comes from impenetrable symbioses between individuals and
subversive literature; in recent times, submergence in the idiocy
of ones own tape recorders has also proved an effective exile.
The totalitarian effect of recording media can only be undone
by media of self-insulation.

Shortly before the trees of life from immemorial agrarian
folklore transformed into the trees of freedom in the French
Revolution, the suggestions of the Viennese doctor Mesmer
and the Marquis de Puysegur led to the metamorphosis of the
tree of life into the emblem of that first modern psychotherapy
movement discussed above with reference to intersubjective
practices of closeness. 31 In his study The Discovery of the Uncon¬
scious , Henri F. Ellenberger captured the primal scene of this
new method under the “magic tree”:

The public square of the small village of Buzancy, surrounded
by thatched cottages and trees, was not far from the majestic
castle of the Puys^gurs. In the center of that square stood a
large, beautiful old elm tree, at the foot of which a spring
poured forth its limpid waters. The peasants would sit on the
surrounding stone benches. Ropes were hung in the trees
main branches and around its trunk, and the patients wound
ends of the rope around the ailing parts of their bodies. The
operation started with the patients’ forming a chain, holding
one another by the thumbs. They began to feel the fluid
circulate among them to varying degrees. After a while, the
master ordered the chain to be broken and the patients to rub
their hands. He then chose a few of them and, touching them
with his iron rod, put them into “perfect crisis.” To

The Back Pter ration /407

Magnetized trees, cover illustration o t Bockmanns Archiv, 1787

408 / Bubbles

“disenchant” them (that is, to wake them from their magnetic
sleep), Puysegur ordered them to kiss the tree, whereupon
they awoke, remembering nothing of what had happened . 32

For all its primitive and bucolic aspects, the scene nonetheless
constitutes the decisive moment in Puys^gurs psychological
secession from Mesmers doctrinaire nature-philosophical
physicalism. For, by leading to the discovery and systematic
application of what would later be known as “hypnosis,” this
bizarre arrangement under the tree of life with its umbilical
connections constituted the breakthrough to the scenic princi¬
ple in psychotherapeutic treatment, and hence to that
historization of the soul s space whose philosophical principles
were brought to fruition by Schelling and Hufeland, and whose
biographical-physiological substrate was developed fully in
Freudian psychoanalysis. In addition, it is more than likely that
Puysegurs idea of connecting his patients to the magnetized
elm with ropes came from the model of the magnetic baquet
whose cables Mesmer had connected to his clients in his Paris
practice. It seems logical to view the elm and the baquet as two
means of staging the same contact-magical motif, namely
therapeutic deep regression; this would mean that the tree of
life in Buzancy constituted a herbaceous magnetization
machine and the baquet, conversely, a mechanized tree of life. In
both arrangements, the ropes and cables imply a metaphorical
umbilical cord intended to place the individual in a melting
relationship with its re-proximated companion. Both con¬
structs represent the difficulty for modern psychology of
reminding us of the lost, unknown and embarrassing double as
the condition of possibility of psychological augmentedness.

The B-ack Plantation / 409

Franz Anton Mesmer, Correspondance de M. Mesmer sur les nouvelles decouvertes du
baquet octagonal, de rhomme-baquet ex du baquet moral\ pouvant servir de mite aux
aphorismes [Correspondence of Mr. Mesmer on the New Discoveries of the Octago¬
nal Baquet, the Man-Baquet and the Moral Baquet, Which Can Serve to Follow the
Aphorisms], Paris, 1785

410 / Bjobies

Baquet belonging co Fran/. Anton Mesmer, 1784

For, while the progressive factions of civil society set about con-
structing a humanity devoid of original sin in which every person
has the freedom to be potentially perfect in themselves, the more
radical modern psychologists attempt a reformulation of the con¬
ditio Humana in which original sin returns as primal separation.
You do not need to have “done anything wrong” yet to share in
the universal human ability to despair. No one articulated this
more clearly than Franz Kafka, who noted down the following
during the First World War:

Tc© Black Plantation / 411

82. Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its
account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account
of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.

83. We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the
Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of
the Tree of Life. The condition in which we find ourselves is
sinful, guilt or no guilt. 33

If one reproduces the religious category of sin with the psycho¬
logical concept of separation, it points to the heart of
unanalyzability. A few lines later, Kafka responds to the insistence
on that separation which seeks to elude the understanding of ones
mere fellow humans with the motto: “Never again psychology!” 34

412 / Bubbles

CHAPTER 6

Soul Partitions
Angels—Twins—Doubles

Further, Damascene says that where the angel operates, there
he is.

— Thomas Aquinas, Of the Angels in Relation to Place 1

The unconscious is housed. Our soul is an abode. [...] Now
everything becomes clear, the house images move in both direc¬
tions: they are in us as much as we are in them.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 1

Now tell me in what society, or beside whom, you live, and I
will tell you who you arc; describe your double, your guardian
angel, your parasite, and I will recognize your identity.

— Michel Serres, Atlas 3

All births are twin births; no one comes into the world unac¬
companied or unattached. Every arrival who ascends to the light
is followed by a Eurydice—anonymous, mute and not made to
be beheld. What will remain, namely the individual that cannot
be separated again, is already the product of a separating cut that

413

Apotheosis of Antonias Pius and Faustina. The emperors genius, holding the
imperial sphaira, carries the ruling couple up to heaven.

divides die previously inseparable parries into the child and the
remainder. Eurydice perishes, yet only seemingly vanishes
without trace, for aside from the navel—that fleshly monument
to the former connection with her—she also leaves behind a
spheric lacuna in the space around her child, her protege and
twin. The companion, which was originally yonder in the first
closeness, discreetly departs by leaving open the place of its
absence. After it is cleared out, the first Yonder leaves behind the
outline of a first Away. For a moment, while the With is disposed
of, the child is exposed to a hint of unaccompanied ness—yet this
precarious moment normally remains a fleeting one that is “for¬
gotten,” as new presences immediately stake their claims in the
extra-uterine position. For the abandoned, exposed child, it

414 / Bubbles

seems as if Eurydice has been lost in the commotion and will
reappear shortly; and indeed, what she was does return in a
sense—but as something else. Once as a new balance has been
established, other authorities take Eurydices place. The great
shirt, as dramatic as its forms and consequences are, seems entirely
lawful and natural; everything is now completely different, and
yet it all remains vaguely the same as before. Thus every newborn
gains early experience of revolution; somehow the total other
will, after all, be like the situation it overturns. This affects every¬
thing that comes afterwards, for the important passages and
successful revolutions—are they not the ones that establish a
continuum of continuum and non-continuum? The successful
revolution is the transition to the total other that still manages to
follow on from the good old days.

The beginning of being outside, like that of philosophy, is
amazement. Eurydices farewell gift to Orpheus is the space in
which replacements are possible. Her Away creates a free sphere
for new media. Eurydice gives Orpheus his strange freedom;
thanks to her withdrawal, he can devote his eternal infidelity to
his former companion. Replaceability is Eurydices inextin¬
guishable trace; it enables her separated lover to be constantly
involved with others, whose changing faces always appear in the
same M place. M The “mother” will be the first of these others who
materialize in that certain place. Her bodily emanations and
discharges, the pillow-like qualities of the womb—these are the
first With substitutes; they introduce new levels of resonance
into the Orphic bubble. Orpheus is now forever dead in Eury¬
dice, but Eurydice lives on in him in her replacements. Through
his interaction with ever new Eurydice substitutes, Orpheus is
constantly re-adjusted for more complex scenarios. If the psyche

Sou' Partitions / 41.5

is a historical element, it is because its progressive recastings and
enrichments of the primitive spheric dual lend it a disposition
towards what one thoughtlessly terms “growing up.”

The teachings about gods and spirits in European antiquity dis¬
play uncoded traces of a relatively uncomplicated awareness of the
dual. Around 238 AD, the rhetorician Censorinus presented an
erudite celebratory speech on the forty-ninth birthday of his
patron Caerilus entitled de die natali y a merry collection of the
knowledge of his time relating to the day of birth. It includes a
reflection on the question “What is a Genius?”, a being that
supposedly accompanies the life of every human, “and why do we
venerate him especially on our birthdays?”

1. A Genius is a god under whose protection each person lives
from the moment of his birth. Whether it is because he makes
sure we get generated, or he is generated, in any case, it is clear
he is called our “Gen-ius” from “gen-eration ” 2. Many ancient
authors have handed down that the Genius and the Lar, the
household god, are the same thing [...]. It was believed that the
Genius has the greatest, or rather absolute, power over us. 3.
Many believed that two Geniuses should be worshipped, at
least in married households. Euclides of Megara, the follower of
Socrates, however, said that a double Genius has been appointed
for each of us [...]. And so we offer special sacrifice to our
Genius every year throughout our lives. [...] 5. Our Genius, on
the other hand, has been appointed to be so constant a watcher
over us that he never goes away from us for even a second, but
is our companion from the moment we are taken from our
mothers womb to the last day of our life. 4

416 / Bubb ! es

The document expresses clearly that for Romans, there was no
such thing as a single birthday, as humans are never bom alone.
Every birthday is a double birthday; on that day one not only
commemorates the supposedly joyful event, but—even more
so—the indissoluble link between the individual and its
guardian spirit, which exists coram populo 5 from that day on.
Roman birthdays were thus celebrations of an alliance—they
were honored like jubilees of foundations or contracts; on those
days, individuals commemorate their partnership with the com¬
panion spirit, which accompanies them as an outer soul in an
unbreakable spheric alliance. Hence the individual is connected
less directly to its progenitors, even its mother, than to its genius
(unless one wanted to identify the mother as the child’s true
genius, as Hegel did); 6 it is immediately related only to the inti¬
mate god who will lead a parallel life in the closest and most
intimate position for the full length of the individuals existence.
That is why it can—as its only epithet—be termed an observatory
but the observer is simultaneously a conserver: a specialized god
whose area of attention and protection only extends to the one
individual life. Certainly a human can be an observer in relation
to other humans and things, but in existential tandem with the
genius, he is exclusively the observed—the partner and recipient
of an attention directed purely at him. For Romans, then, the
central principle of philosophy in the Modern Age —cogito
ergo sum —would have remained completely incomprehensible,
as they would only ever have been able to expect the passive
formulation: “I am thought of, therefore I am.” 7 (Only in
much later periods, when the observer-genius was completely
interiorized, would the still-dominant concept of the self-
augmenting, self-contemplating, self-caring individual emerge,

Soj Partitions / 417

Apotheosis of Antonius Pius and Faustina. The emperor’s genius, holding the
imperial sphaira , carries the ruling couple up to heaven.

416/ Bubbles

JOB Mr ■

* j^mw# -:v_^ L v '- vt****** «

which understands itself as an autonomous, self-transparent orb.
It is in this orb, indeed, that all imagining must be accompanied
by an “I think” and all actions by a parallel “I know what I am
doing”; conscience-time, writing-time, time of the genius that
has been transferred from the outside to the inside.) 8 Birthdays
serve to seal the pact of companionship between individual and
genius and anchor it in reciprocity. This does not at all mean,
however, that the subject guarded by the genius could also
observe the observer; if someone expressly focuses on their
genius on their birthday, this occurs in the form of devoting a
ritually structured commemoration to it out of reverence and a
duty to show gratitude. The individual celebrates its alliance of
animation with the genius by satisfying the divinity exclusively
assigned to it with well-defined sacrifices. These include, above
all, libations with unmixed wine. Under no circumstances
should animal sacrifices be made, for it is forbidden for humans
to take the life of any creature on the day when they came into
the world. It seems especially significant that no one is allowed
to sample the offering made to the genius before the maker of
the offering, the birthday child. Not even a pontiff is permitted
to mediate between the subject and its genius, for when it comes
to the personal life spirit, each Roman individual is like a protes-
tant avant la lettre , and must therefore become a priest for itself
once a year. Nonetheless, this private day of celebration is also a
social event, and it is not without reason that the relatives and
familiares celebrate the birthday together with the jubilarian.
Aside from all that, Censurinus leaves the precise conditions of
the bond between child and genius open. Whether the genius
itself brings about conception, or is co-conceived, or only joins
the child after conception in order to take over responsibility for

420 / Bubbles

it—this can remain undecided for now. In the latter case, the
genius would be a form of divine precursor to the father, for in
the Roman view it is the fathers who give their progeny a status
in life by taking them in their arms {infantem suscipere ), and thus
acknowledging them as their legitimate children. 9 It is no coin¬
cidence that the general Roman understanding of the genius was
first of all the mans specific life force, while women received life
from Juno. Censorinus does not provide any information about
the formalities of Roman womens birthdays. The identity of
geniuses and Lares , which the author considers certain, at least
seems to grant the protective spirits a certain domestic juris¬
diction and stabilitas loci\ for, since time immemorial, the
household spirits—the Lares—have been considered place-
bound, space-filling presences that are usually ancestral spirits.
They are the close-range divinities par excellence . If, however, the
ancestors cling to their houses, it is because houses were almost
always also graves in ancient times, with urns or coffins kept in
precisely specified places: the ancestral shrine or the Lararium.
What would later be considered haunting was initially merely an
occupation of the domestic intimate space by spirits of the dead,
something that had come to be considered entirely natural in
many cultures in times of sedentarism. The liaison of house and
spirit highlighted by the Lares remained in force everywhere
throughout the entire process of civilization, up until very
recent times; it lives on in modern ghost stories, which still
confirm the connection between the casing and animation.

When the narrator in Henry James’ splendid doppelganger
novella The Jolly Comer seeks out his dastardly and unkempt alter
ego, this takes place with psycho-topological necessity in the

Soul PWWcra / 421

interior of a large, empty house that offers a providential setting
for the drama of an uncanny self-augmentation. James lets the
companion mutate into a genius malignus> a para-noogenous
pursuer; but the external setting, the secret and weird house in
the middle of the metropolis New York, still provides the exact
spheric form in which the split subject can be left at the mercy of
its stalking double. 10

In truth, there can be no domesticity without the inhabiting
subjects expanding and establishing themselves in their respec¬
tively particular ways. The building of houses initiated interior
creations of direct psycho-spheric significance. From the start,
the poetics of the domestic space corresponds to mental parti¬
tions between the poles of the intimate field of subjectivity.
Initially, living in house-like containers always has a dual charac¬
ter: it means both the coexistence of humans with humans and
the community of humans with their invisible companions. It
has, in a sense, always been the household spirits that have given
an inhabited building dignity and meaning. The interior is born
from the connection between architecture and invisible inhabi¬
tants. In fact, it is not unlikely that the oldest Mesopotamian
notions of guardian spirits related to buildings, especially temples
and palaces, and were only later transferred to individuals and
personal representatives. Assyrian palaces were first guarded by
those famous winged bulls, the kerub colossuses whose imago
supposedly entered Christian angel iconology after long journeys
through Jewish and Hellenistic phases. These guardian spirits
were not yet mobile divine couriers, but rather place-bound
keepers of a monarcho-sphere in the stricter sense—that is, a
royal interior that constitutes a special kind of “power-protected
interiority.” The space shared by the prince and those close to

422 / Busbies

him must be architecturally secured before the routine long¬
distance communications emanating from the palace can be set
up. As the house is> so is the kingdom: if the kingdom outside
is not secured, the ruler cannot yet withdraw to his palace, the
broadcasting center of calm power, but must himself act as the
messenger of the power he is assigned, bringing this to mind at
critical sites with the risk of physical violence. It is characteristic
of the monarch that he views not only the palace, but his entire
domain of rule as the extension of himself; if the kingdom were
not present within its bearer as a spatial idea and a task of con¬
cern, it could not be maintained outside either. But as soon as an
inner world with the dimensions of a kingdom including a palace
interior has been consolidated, there is a need for volatile, fast¬
travelling intermediate beings that ensure the swift accessibility
of all points in the large-scale interior. The time of established
kingdoms would therefore become the golden age of winged and
wingless messengers. They are the new media of heavenly and
earthly communication for kings—their business is angelia ,
bringing the lords message, be it good or bad. The political
theologians of earlier advanced civilizations never hesitated,
moreover, to place whole empires—like animated houses—
under the protection of the spirits and gods of the kingdom, and
the Christian kingdoms seldom made exceptions to this rule. At
Charlemagne's request, Pope Urban VI made the Archangel
Michael, who distinguishes himself in transcendent campaigns as
the commander of the heavenly host, the patron of the Carolin-
gian kingdom; the Catholic Church celebrates his day on
September 29th. It cannot be said that Europe’s military
archangel failed to live up to his task; under his banner, the army
of Otto I repulsed the Hungarian cavalry in 955 at Lechfeld.

Soul Partitions / 423

Figure of warrior wirh club and “second ego,* San Augustin Archeological Park,
Colombia

424 / Bubolas

One should recall this event if one wishes to call to mind (for the
last time) the difference between a substance-based Europe, uni¬
fied by its angel, and a function-based Europe that would seek its
motif of unity in a common currency.

The Roman genius is a representative from the immeasurable
collection of soul companions and guardian spirits of which the
mythologies of peoples and major religions tell. From a religion-
typological perspective, it belongs to the morphological circle of
outer souls which, like the Egyptian Ka or the Mesopotamian
guardian spirits Ilu, Ishtaru, Shedu and Lamassu, were assigned
to the inner life forces of individuals as external supplements. 11
Even the Socratic daimonion> though it already tended to articu¬
late itself as an internalized guardian spirit, like an early
argument for the conscience, still belongs typologically to the
external or supplementary souls as a threshold figure; Socrates
speaks of this subtle guest, which intervenes in his monologue, as
if it came from an external space of closeness. Properties of the
outer soul are also found in the character -daimon which,
according to the great myth of the hereafter in the tenth book of
Plato’s Republic (620 d-e), is assigned to every soul that has
chosen a new earthly fate by Lachesis, one of the three Fates.

Like most figures of this type, the Roman genius appears as
an unmodulated fixture; it accompanies its charges affairs like a
benevolent silent partner with no claims or demands for devel¬
opment; its constancy stems from the fact that it is a spirit with
few qualities. With an unchanging form and as a mysterious
union of the wonderful and the reliable, it ensures that the
psychological space inhabited by the ancient subject discretely
and continuously borders on a proximate transcendence. Hence

Soul Partkoos / 425

the ancients could never imagine the individual life simply as a
distinctive soul-point, a trapped spark or striking flame; existence
very much has a spheric and medial structure, because the subject
is always placed inside a demigod-like field of protection and
attention. Each individual floats in ghostly surroundings,
whether one imagines the guardian spirit as a person-like com¬
panion residing in an invisible vis-k-vis or conceives it in
auratic-environmental fashion as a “divine milieu” that wanders
with the subject. Whatever the case may be, the presence of the
genius ensures that the individual not only incorporates its psy¬
chological principle within itself like an isolated point of force,
but in fact wears its innermost other around itself like a force
field—and is equally carried and enclosed by it. The field creates
closeness from within itself, because it is peculiar to the genius
that it never moves far from its charge. (This is where the Roman
idea of the protective spirit deviates significantly from that of
many archaic peoples, who believe that outer souls can withdraw
and go astray in the distance; the practice known as shamanism
is, among other things, a technique for tracing stray free souls
and bringing them back to their hosts—the historical prototype
of all treatments for depression.) 12 As far as the structure of the
dual field in the psychohistorical discourses and symbolisms of
antiquity, it is evident that it does not yet know any real modifi¬
cations within the dual; it is rigid by nature, and scarcely tolerates
any biographically conditioned developments. We are still a long
way from a non-theological, dynamic concept of spheres. It is
not without reason that Censorinus describes the guardian spirit
as “placed alongside,” adpositus , the individual; this apposition
clearly involves no internal modulations, let alone recastings or
upgrades in the registers of resonance. At most, the brief reference

426 / B JCb es

to the doctrine of Socrates' pupil Euclides concerning the two
geniuses {binos genios) holds the seed for a dialectical view of
the companion spirits; Euclides may have meant that there was
a division of labor, perhaps even quarrelling, among geniuses,
where one of these could perhaps be envisaged as a good
demon, the other as an evil one. 13 But even with double
accompaniment, the structure of the metaphysically imagined
dual space remains unchangingly rigid. A dynamic and psy¬
chological view would only become possible through the
modern concept of augmentative variables, which describes
the separate, yet connected poles of the dual appearing at new
levels through altered volume and richer contents. This provides
the tools for an analysis of sphere-immanent recastings—and
only from this analysis can one formulate a phenomenology of
the fully matured spirit: a mature subjectivity would be one
that had developed its geniuses from micro- to macrospheric
functions without breaking the continuum. The new micros-
pherology thus creates the conditions for the discussion of the
dual space to emancipate itself from religious languages,
without depriving these of their virtual truth content. Only
in spherological terms can one repeat those elements of
psyho-spheric knowledge preserved and protected by mythical-
religious discourses from corruption through false concept
formations.

That the allocation of roles between the individual and its
companion spirit cannot be conceived of in a religious-meta¬
physical imaginative framework without logical complications is
shown by numerous documents from the ancient world. For, as
soon as the subtle guardians are no longer imagined as permanent,
discreet presences in the individuals immediate surroundings,

Soul Part ticns f 427

instead approaching them as episodically appearing delegates—
which is the rule in the biblical world—a precarious
epistemological relation develops between the subject and its
companion. In most cases, the subject does not directly recog¬
nize the manifested angel as “its” angel, as no relation of
familiarity exists between them. That is why the stereotypical
form in which angels address humans in the Bible is “Be not
afraid!” {Et die ne timeas)} 4 The fear of God is preceded by the
fear of the angel and the cancellation of that fear by the mes¬
senger himself. When Saint Peter is freed from the dungeon of
Herod Agrippa, the apostle does not even realize that he is expe¬
riencing a “real” angelic intervention, as opposed to a dream
vision (Acts 12:7-10). By contrast, some Neoplatonically ori¬
ented angelologists have proposed that angels can, as pure
spirits, not know individuals, as they have knowledge only of
general concepts, not individual beings (singularia). Thus angels
can have intentions about peoples, communities or the human
race as a whole, but not detailed knowledge about individuals,
let alone local relationships with them; this theory is supported
by the mystical authority of Pseudo-Dionysius, whose text Celes¬
tial Hierarchy was, for a while, understood as meaning that angels
only operated on a general, not an individual level. In his
treatise on the nature of angels, Thomas Aquinas attempted to
refute this excessively Platonizing view, which destroys the
personal element of angel-to-human contact in the Bible,
through the authority of the scriptures and with reference to
the consensus among scholars and the people. To him, it was
clear that Gods omnipotence worked through these angelic
second causes and had a direct influence and foreknowledge
that also extended to individual details. 15

428 / Bubbles

Be not afraid, Matthias Oiriincwald, lsenheim Altarpiece, inside
of outer wing

So j Partitions / 429

The mystery of accessibility: Carlo Crivelli, Annunciation , i486, oil on wood

430 / BubSlss

Seraphim on a mural in the Church of Sant Cliinent, Taiill, 13th century

Soul Parti: ore / *31

To avoid the tensions inevitably resulting from the imbalance
between incorporeal and corporeal spirits—one could call it the
ontological difference between angels and humans—numerous
pious authors of accounts describing individual angels chose a sly
way out: they let the personalized angel appear in the form of a
twin. One finds the model for this in the first of the legends about
Saint Anthony in the Apophtegmata Patrum Aegyptiorum :

When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset
by accidie y and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to
God, “Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not
leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be
saved?” A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out,
Anthony saw a man like himself [my emphasis, P. S.] sitting at
his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down
and plaiting a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an
angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard
the angel saying to him, “Do this and you will be saved.” At
these words, Anthony was filled with joy and courage. He did
this, and he was saved. 16

The edifying twin pantomime removes, from the start, the sting
of one possible problem of knowledge that could impair the
human-angel relationship. The man “like himself” is an
immanent-transcendent apparition unambiguously intended for
Anthony; a mirroring space between the desert father and his
double comes about in which informative communication imme¬
diately occurs. The benevolent angel is the reply to human upset;
the twin appears as a precisely dosed angelic simile for its human
pendant. He heals him by acting as a model—a case of monastic

432/Bubbles

homeopathy. In our context it is unimportant that we have the
primal scene of ora et labora (pray and keep fit) before us; the
decisive aspect is rather the turn towards an individual angelology,
which here seems to take place both naively and emphatically.
At the moment when the angel takes on the form of a twin, a
kind of micro-species comprising two individuals is born. The
twin pair of human and angel consists of two singularities that
together form a species, something biune and general. In this
particular case, the angels side would already be something indi¬
vidual and general in itself, as it founds a species on the basis of
the unique, namely the quality of Anthony-shapedness. It there¬
fore possesses, wonderfully enough, an a priori knowledge of the
individual. 17 The human side also draws ontological profit from
this augmentation and encounter, for, despite being singular, as
an individual, it is taken up into a sacred biune quantity in
which it stabilizes itself metaphysically; it can tell from the angel
that it is itself an idea of God. In cognition-theological terms,
there is much to suggest that a divine intellect could only
remember such biune human-angel quantities; isolated humans
would be invisible to it, and would elude all co-knowledge
through their singular autism. 18 Thus the individual angel is, as
it were, the optical lens through which the divine intellect espies
the individual. If the angel disappears, the intelligent individual
is also extinguished; from that point it could only be registered,
but no longer recognized. The angel-less subject could be
described externally, as modern psychology does with “unana¬
lysable” ones, but it could certainly no longer be reached
through communicative intentions.

The twin angel phantasms of late antiquity reach their cli¬
max in the accounts associated with Mani (216-276), the

Soul Partitions / 433

founder of the Gnostic, semi-Christian two-principle religion
which became notorious as Manichaism—that is, the “Mani
lives” movement—and whose name, thanks to successful
Catholic campaign of denunciatory propaganda, is still used
pejoratively in todays secular culture.

Mani acquired the art of wise words at a very young age. And
at the completion of his twelfth year, he was inspired from
above by (a being) he called the King of the Gardens of Light
[...]. And the angel that brought him (this) revelation was
called al-Tawm, from the Nabatean word meaning ‘compan¬
ion” [..♦] (So) when he turned twenty-four, al-Tawm brought
him forth saying: “Now is the time for you to appear [...] "

Mani claimed that he was the Paraclete, foretold by Jesus. 19

Naturally the proximity between the name al-Taunn and the Ara¬
maic toma , “twin,” catches the eye. That Mani s “companion” or
Syzygos indeed had qualities of a transfigured twin is unmis¬
takably clear from the tales of Mani’s vocation in the Cologne
Mani Codex, as well as Middle Persian sources:

[...] from the spring of the waters there appeared to me a
human form which showed me by the hand the “rest” so that I
might not sin and bring distress on him.

In this way, from the age of four until the time when I
reached my physical prime, I was (secretly) kept safe in the
hands of the most holy angels and powers of holiness. 20

[...] At the time when my body had reached completion,
that well-formed, impressive mirror image of my person came
and appeared to me. 21

434 / Bubbles

|...| Now too he accompanies me, and he himself shelters
and protects me. With his strength I fight against Az and
Ahrmen, and teach mankind wisdom. And this work of the
gods and the wisdom and knowledge of the gathering of the
souls, which I received from the twin [...]. 22

The case of Mani is primarily informative because it shows how
(lie intimate psychological supplementation through the twin
can be combined with a missionary function of cosmic implica¬
tions. That the twin—if we read correctly—first spoke to Mani
from a mirror image in the water offers a variation on the myth
of Narcissus, albeit with the difference that no fatal confusion of
subject and image ensues, just as the appearance of the double
seems devoid of the implications of death or doom that are so
common in doppelganger mythology; rather, the individual
encounters a heightened after ego in which it recognizes its ego
ideal and the teacher for its life program. Enlightenment varia¬
tions on this myth from late antiquity, incidentally, granted
Narcissus the company of a sister whom he loved above all else,
and who looked and dressed exactly as he did; after her death, he
sought relief from his disconsolate state in the sight of his own
mirror image in the water. 23 In this version, the motif of the
augmentative twin gains primacy over the fatal confusion of
doubling; it is, admittedly, the twin sister who now has to pay the
price for the pathological equation of double-appearance and
death. As far as Mani $ twin is concerned, who belongs to the
group of bright augmenters, he no longer has the modest features
of the Roman genius. Certainly the double of the religion¬
founding Mani is also connected to his existence in a genius-like,
intimate microspheric alliance; at the same time, however, the

Sail Partiions / 436

twin has charged himself up with the expansive elan of Middle
Eastern missionary religiosity, and is steeped in the cosmic pre¬
tensions of Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic universal theology.
Mani is thus not only subtly supplemented by his twin, but also
spurred on by him to undertake ventures of world-spanning
scope. Typologically speaking, Mani s twin liaison has parallels to
Mohammeds alliance with the Archangel Gabriel, who would
later dictate the Koran. We are clearly in the heartland of
monotheistic mediumism: here, being a subject eo ipso means
carrying a prophetic load. In this sense, one can say that
prophetology is the basic science of the subject in expansive
monotheism of the post-Jewish type. 24 The case of Mani—like
that of Jesus—shows a state of the world in which micro- and
macrospheric structures can be effectively nested within each
other. From this historical turning point on, intimate religion
already has the authority to speak the language of universal reli¬
gion. We reach the age of individuals who, endangered by
estrangement, can only find salvation on paths of internalization,
defying the way of the world and avoiding imperial coercions.
Before there could be any robust, cosmologically relevant battle
of principles between good and evil in Manichaism, however, the
subtle idea of an integral dual form first had to be found in the
account of Mani s own development. Only in this way could the
intimate religiosity of the twin-spirit faith be connected to univer-
salist and expansionist programs. Religion responds to the political
breakthrough to the idea of worldwide empire by postulating cas¬
ings for the divine spirit in the form of a worldwide church. We
will discuss how this took place in the case of Christianity later
on. 25 It is no coincidence that Mani—who died after being kept in
chains for twenty-six days in 276—left behind a church extending

436/Bubbles

from Rome to China. The thermal center of this para-Christian
empjre of preaching was the young Mani s silent encounter with
the image of his twin in the water. How such expansions from
microspheric dyads—Mani and his twin, Jesus and his Abba—to
worldwide churches became structurally and psychohistorically
possible will be examined in the second volume.

The genius, the twin, the guardian angel and the outer soul form
a group of elemental and enduring concepts for the second pole
in the psycho-spheric dual. All these figures result from recastings
of the first There, which left a vacant space for supportive, close
accompanying elements. But while the original fetal There and
With is essentially anonymous and unconscious, the later com¬
panions must be presented under public names and observable
concepts—whether in analogy to natural persons, as with the
twin, or taking notions of invisible force subjects or spirits, which
can be found in the imaginary realms of all cultures, as a model.
One could call the aforementioned soul companion concepts,
where they appear as successors to and substitutes for an archaic
anonym, figurations of the placental double; in truth, these
elements would not be able to develop their soul-space-securing
qualities if they did not already find, set up in the intrauterine
bubble, a primitive Yonder-Here structure that they could enter
as Yonder-figures and allies on a higher level. One can see that
the subtle partitions in the soul space are, in psychological terms,
archaic companion figures under suspicion of immaturity. Where
such figures occupy a lasting place, they threaten to hinder their
replacement by their rightful evolutionary successors, most of all
the imaginary parents that are meant to establish an inner double
model of fruitful life in a healthy tension between genders.

Sou Pan tions / 437

Therefore, according to analytical orthodoxy, the images oi
angels and twins must also perish so that their place can finally,
through further recastings, be taken by the models of sexual
maturity—and, beyond these, by the cultural models. The indi¬
vidual is not meant to remain the inseparable companion of its
primitive, intimate alter ego forever, but rather to develop into
the pole of a mentally and physically fruitful couple. In his play
Nathan the Wise , Lessing skillfully shows how the image of the
saving angel must perish in the soul of a girl for that of the real
man to emerge in its place. The homoerotic couple in the
middle of a very earthly household would—according to the
psychoanalytical Vulgate—be the minimum goal in every history
of mental maturation. Logically speaking, maturation means
nothing other than the increasing readiness to count to three,
four and five; it would be the final stage of a recasting process
rich in phases as well as transitional subjects and objects.

As far as the placental doubles are concerned, their appearance
already testifies to the formation of a mental space with pro¬
nounced attributes of a microcosm. The ego and its alter ego, the
individual and its genius, the child and its angel: they all form
microcosmic bubbles in which the dense worldlessness of the
intrauterine position, with its blueprint for the Yonder-Here
structure, has already cleared a little and been modified into the
moderated worldlessness of the early ego-alter ego dual; it is this
dual that foreshadows later, more complex realities.

Five structural elements are constitutive of the small world:
the first two, trivially enough, comprise the holders of the Here
and Yonder poles—that is, the self and the With-self, which, as
shown above, are always connected from the start in original
augmentation, and which are further enriched and differentiated

438 / Subclass

through separations and reconnections. The third is provided by
the container form in which the Here-Yonder field is embedded.
The fourth characteristic is the free mutual accessibility of the
two poles, and it is typical of the twin, the angel and their coun¬
terparts that they have no problems in accessing their other—the
companions are always in the room already. The angel, like the
genius, does not seek; it finds. For it, the creature of closeness
that is always there from the start, the other pole is disclosed a
priori through resonance; for the subject, however, in so far as it
turns towards the companion, a degree of sheltered being-
outside-itself is the norm. Inside the bubble, ecstasy, being with
the other, is the usual state; because the bubble is the absolute
place, I am always in place when I am in it—and in it at the other
pole. In the following chapter, we will show that this is first and
foremost a psychoacoustic relationship which comes about
through the ecstasy of anticipatory listening.

The fifth structural element of the small world are the mem¬
brane functions that are native to the companion from the
outset. As an original augmented the companion ensures both
the formation and opening of the space and its care and closure.
In this sense, the subjects “chance and misfortune” depend
entirely on the quality of the mental membrane that simulta¬
neously provides and denies access to the world. The twin is a
manner of sluice through which the metabolic exchange between
subject and world takes place. The degree of its opening deter¬
mines whether there is dehydration or flooding. If the
companions membrane is not sufficiently porous to let through
increasing amounts of world, it can become a prison for the
subject; it closes it off from the ‘outside world”—or rather, the
extra-symbiotic spheres. If, on the other hand, the companion is

Soj Partitions / 439

lost prematurely, or remains indifferent or absent for a long
time, the subject will suffer an openness shock, tumbling “out”
into the harmful ecstasy of a fear of destruction; it becomes
acquainted with an exospheric outside in which it cannot bear
itself. Both extremes—twin autism and pathological fear of the
outside as a space of destruction—are typical consequences of a
failure of the companions membrane function. They show what
consequences an excessive or a deficient protection of ones space
in early psychological processes can have. The case of the British
twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons, who closed themselves
off from the outside world for years through their persistent
silence in order to live in radical-symbiotic fashion in their “own
world,” received great attention, including coverage in the
tabloid press. 26 They testify to the risk that the intimate com¬
panion—if it appears in too real, obsessive and impermeable a
form—may seal the bubble off to the outside so strongly that a
hermetic inner life will start to blossom in forms of two-party
autism. Such cases have the merit, at least, of demonstrating to
profane viewers—that is, anti-depth psychologists—the reality
of internal psycho-spheric relationships in palpable forms. On
the other hand, numerous cases of autism in early childhood,
dealt with in the landmark studies by the psychologists Rene A.
Spitz and Bruno Bettelheim, can be read as traces of invasions
by a malign infinity of the early intimate space. The empty
fortresses of autism are first and foremost defense systems that
protect the subject from spatial panic and death by abandon¬
ment. They show the opposite extreme of the destruction of the
soul space; for while the over-accompanied soul threatens to
remain trapped in hermetic communions, the under-accompanied
one withdraws into an uncommunicative, frozen state as a

440 / Bubbles

Jennifer and June exchange their secret sign, from Marjorie Wallace, The Silent Twins

security measure, rendering itself unreachable to all overtures
from the outside world. The fate of the autistic children shows
that the fear of death comes from the same side on which the
integral companion should have shown itself—which is why the
treatment of autism can only make progress as the establishment
of a second trust and new circles of resonance, bypassing the scar
of destruction. Where the discreet companions perform their
membrane duties well, however, the subject grows up in the
oscillating area of that protected openness which provides the
human optimum—that is, in well-tempered ecstasy.

The outer soul—a membrane: this concept can help to
understand why it is only through this medium, this sluice, this
exchanger, that a world can be constructed at all in the subjective

So j Partitions i 4^1

field, that is, in the symbiotic sphere and the spaces that follow
it. As a two-sided form, the membrane firstly ensures that the
world can only reach into the subject, so to speak, via the
“twin”—which temporarily presents itself primarily as the moth¬
er—and secondly, that the self is always already outside with its
double. Together, the subject and its augmenter initially form a
worldless—or own-worldly—intimacy cell; because the subject is
informed by its double, and initially only by it, about the volume
of “world” in the given culture, however, the incipient subject s
access to the outside depends entirely on the membrane qualities
of the inner other. By flying towards the cherished other, it devel¬
ops in the direction of that others wider world. The openness of
the world is the gift of the double as membrane.

Only if the subject has constituted itself in a structure of
protective-permeable twinship from the start—and the prefigu¬
ration of this dual begins, as shown above, in the prenatal
space—can the enrichment of the subjective field through addi¬
tional poles develop into a fitness for community: the adequate
mother is not the direct second, but rather the third in the
alliance of twins, in which the ego is the manifest and the primal
companion the latent part. Mother and child always form a trio
rhat includes the childs invisible partner. If the field is built up
further, the figure of the father adds a fourth pole, while the
siblings (as the close strangers) and unrelated persons (as strange
strangers) form the fifth. Adult subjectivity, then, is communica¬
tive mobility within a five-poled field. It is the ability to enter
differentiated resonances with the genius, the mother, the father,
with siblings or friends and with strangers. Translated into musi¬
cal terms, the elementary development progresses from the duet
to the quintet. At every stage, it is the companion that formats

442 / Bubbles

its subject and makes it available; a discrete genius evokes a
discrete individual in an adequately defined world.

In traditional cultures, children must become at least as men¬
tally spacious as their parents in order to move into the world
house of their tribe. In advanced cultures, this factor is joined by
professional spirits of provocation and soul expanders—which,
in the case of the ancient Greeks, led to the discovery of school
and the transformation of demons into teachers. (The teacher
historically appears on the scene as a second father; he oversees
the sensitive transition from the quartet stage, which is still
limited to the family, to the quintet—that is, to the minimum
form of society. Since the advent of teachers, fathers have found
themselves observing dissimilar sons.)

The history of formal pedagogy shows that in all higher
cultures, mothers are deprived of their psychocratic monopoly
on the children when the threshold between rearing and educating
is reached. When Hegel says in his lectures on psychology that
“the mother is the genius of the child,” he is describing—albeit
inadequately—the starting point of parenting on the level of the
sentient soul and the sensing, yet still aconceptual subjectivity.
Certainly the individual, after its placental and fetal-acoustic
conditioning, must first of all be infused with the mothers soul
and, as Hegel puts it, made to “tremble”; once it has completed
its education, however, the spirit of the individual—according to
the idealistic schema—is supposed to be infused purely with the
self-assured concept, which no longer trembles. 27

The mode in which the companions presence is experienced
at the start is initially mostly a non-visual one, as the subjects
ancient history lies entirely in the pre-visual and pre-imaginary
realms. As far as the (in)existence in the uterine night is concerned,

§OUl Parlittor'is /443

Joseph Beuys, Die Huterin des SchLifi [The Guardian of Sleep]

444 / Bubbles

Sod Partitions / 445

this goes without saying; for the newborns too, however, it is—
leaving aside the elementally significant fascinogenic eye contact
with the mother—the non-visual media of physical contact and
relationships that are clearly predominant. In the child’s earliest
perception, even a genuine twin brother would for a long time be
not so much a sight as a sensed presence, a sound center, some¬
thing touched, a pulse, an aura, a source of pressure actions—and
only lasdy something visible too. This applies all the more to the
early concepts of the present and absent other that develop in the
child in its interactions with the face and body of the mother in
place of the archaic With. The presence of the genius and the
experience of closeness are thus firstly and lastly a matter of
feeling; visual evidence can only join the fields foundation of
self-sensation as a secondary augmentation. Even the childs
supposed early self- w image” is, in reality, not so much a matter of
pictorial imagination or an imago 28 as something in the sensed
self-field. To the great detriment of theory and practice, classical
psychoanalysis already sought to make the early ego fundamen¬
tally dependent on visual self-images, thus going against all
probability; for the infans certainly gains immeasurable experience
of itself and its integrity or disintegration through the sensual
exchange with its mother, but it assimilates relatively little auto-
eidetic information of any significance. Even the reflection in the
mirror that it may see and recognize is inevitably interpreted in
the inner light of its prior self-sensation. The decisive informa¬
tion about the nature of the self is always already present as a
vague holistic complex of sentiments in the sensed field, and it is
only as a visual supplement to the lived prejudice of its self¬
sensation that the mirror image of the ego can come into its own
as a phenomenon in the visually disclosed space. 29

446/ Bubbles

For the ordinary, more or less umbilically separated individual,
one of the banal givens in its existence as a single being among
other single beings is that the place opposite its navel—which was
occupied in the fetal space by the connection to the With—must
now remain forever vacant, though not empty. That is why
humans perceive a stark difference between the physical awareness
of their back and front sides: the front is the face side, the genital
side and, above all, also the navel side. This front not only includes
the most important orifices and sensors; it is also where the scar of
separation is inscribed upon the body. The navel is located on the
humans front like a monument to the unthinkable; it reminds
people of the thing that no one remembers. It is the pure sign of
that which lies on the other side of the consciously knowable—
which is why if one thinks about it, those who are unwilling to
speak about the navel should also keep quiet about the uncon¬
scious. It signifies the knowledge of an event that concerns me
more than any other, even though I am not eligible as the current
subject of this knowledge. For his entire life, the navel owner looks
past the memorial at the center of his body, like someone who
walks past an equestrian monument every day without ever
wondering whom it represents. This disinterest in ones own pre¬
history has cultural method, for Europeans have always been raised
under a ban on navel contemplation: they are supposed to feel
shame for even thinking it possible to refer to themselves at this
point. Attached to the discreet recess in the middle of our body is
the commandment to refer always and without exception to other
things: the navel is the symbol of our obligation to extraversion. It
fundamentally points forwards into the panorama of things and
subjects that exist for us and with us. The world is meant to
become everything that is the case opposite the navel.

Scul Partitons 1 447

In a short story entitled “Scene.s from the Life of a Double
Monster,” Vladimir Nabokov describes the case of a pair of
Siamese twins born near Karaz, by the Black Sea, who were
bound together by a “fleshy cartilaginous band” at their navels—
omphalopagus diaphragmo-xipbodidymus , as Pancoast has
dubbed a similar case” 30 The fascination of such grown-together
twins seems primarily to be the fact that they show the normally
vacant place opposite the navel as an occupied one. Thus the
curiosity aroused by these monsters—in the sense of showpieces
and cautionary creatures—is not simply one variety of the
aspecific interest in all things abnormal, curious, anecdotal or
surprising. At fairs and circuses the visitors, who come in throngs
from far away to see the double monster, sense a connection to
the secrets of their own individuation. The hunger for this
Siamese obscenity conceals the inarticulable question of the
double, which invisibly accompanies all individuals without its
connection to the navel ever becoming explicit. In the case of the
Siamese twins, the intimate companion has simultaneously
adopted all three of the forms that the With-successor, also
known as the placental augmenter, can have: it is double, genius
and pursuer in one. As the double, the twin embodies two as the
prime number of the soul space; as the genius, it testifies to the
ego-forming happiness of positive augmentation; and as the
pursuer, it incarnates the basic risk inherent in animation, namely
that your innermost point of access might belong to your denier.
(In this sense, hereditary political enemies are also Siamese twins
on the level of psychohistorical accretions—and their separation
is most likely to occur in the surgical war that is followed by
making peace. In the words of Theodor Daubler, quoted by Carl
Schmitt: “The enemy is our own question as a figure ”)

448/Bubbles

Nabokovs Russian twins, Lloyd and Floyd—though these are
their later names as an American variety act—are inseparable
figures in which the archaic shadow has materialized into a
physically present brother. In them, the unthinkable has become
flesh and dwells among us, and the world is happy to recognize
it—no means as an aspect of its own truth, however, but as an
external sensation and a part of natures comedy. Wherever the
twins have to endure being gawked at, a macabre and cursed zone
comes about in which the sacred shines out from the curious.
Because the mystical bond is viewed as a cruel whim of nature,
something that normally remains hidden between saints and their
God can be observed like a zoological fact. For the exhibited
conjoined children, what makes their situation particularly
torturous is that people demand for them to play and communicate
with each other as if they were normal, separate brothers:

Our folks bullied us into gratifying such desires and could not
understand what was so distressful about them. We could have
pleaded shyness; but the truth was that we never really spoke to
each other, even when we were alone, for the brief broken
grunts of infrequent expostulation that we sometimes
exchanged [...] could hardly pass for a dialogue. The com¬
munication of simple essential sensations we performed
wordlessly: shed leaves riding the stream of our shared blood.

The thoughts also managed to slip through and travel between
us. Richer ones each kept to himself, but even then there
occurred odd phenomena. 51

It has been suggested by doctors that we sometimes
pooled our minds when we dreamed. One gray-blue morning
he picked up a twig and drew a ship with three masts in the

Soul Partitions /449

dust I had just seen myself drawing that ship in the dust of a
dream I had dreamed the preceding night. 32

The refinement of Nabokovs story lies in the narrative decision
to develop ir from the perspective of one of the twins, so that the
reader follows this existence as a double monster from within,
like a normal individuality. The twins themselves—as portrayed
by Nabokov—scarcely comprehended their unusual nature in
the first years of their life. Floyd, the narrator, thought of him¬
self as an average human being with a constantly present partner
by his side, and only came to appreciate his extraordinariness
much later:

Each was eminently normal, but together they formed a
monster. Indeed, it is strange to think that the presence of a
mere band of tissue, a flap of flesh not much longer than a
lamb's liver, should be able to transform joy, pride, tenderness,
adoration, gratitude to God into horror and despair. 33

This is how Floyd explains the death of his mother, who perished
out of sorrow over the monsters birth. For Floyd, the primal
scene of his realization took place at the age of seven or eight,
when they encountered a child the same age peering at them
from under a fig tree:

I remember appreciating in full the essential difference
between the newcomer and me. He cast a short blue shadow
on the ground, and so did I; but in addition to that sketchy,
and flat, and unstable companion which he and 1 both owed
to the sun and which vanished in dull weather I possessed yet

460 / Bubbles

another shadow, a palpable reflection of my corporal self, that
I always had by me, at my left side, whereas my visitor had
somehow managed to lose his, or had unhooked it and left it
at home. Linked Lloyd and Floyd were complete and normal;
he was neither . 34

Nabokov poses the question of the criterion for a normal soul
from the perspective of the Siamese twin who assumes that being
joined to the second is the primal state. Equipped with this new
vision, he sees through the halved nature of the others: one has
to be a monster of completeness not to realize that the normal
individuals are those who can detach their companion. From
Floyd s perspective, the strange boy is a monster of isolation—
and it will take a while for him to understand that the monstrous
quality lies with him, not with the separated who have left their
augmenters at home or wherever else. The Siamese twins embody
the neglected "umbilical castration,” the missed letting-go of the
other. In their umbilical field, unlike those of ordinary individuals,
no invisible companions and dreamy intentions of desire for
them were able to establish themselves. For these twins, the
double remains carnally, all too carnally present. That is why
Siamese twins can be exhibited at fairs: they stand before the
fascinated crowd as individuals who have caught their angel in a
trap—their companion is condemned to appearing, their genius
must endure a descent into the body. Faced with this monstrous
exception, even the dullest gazer senses the law of human incar¬
nation: where there was a physical bond, there will now be a
symbolic one. Whoever sees the twins breathes a sigh of relief
and is glad that God, should He exist, has stayed in the back¬
ground in their own case. In no temple could this truth be more

Soui Pari itier’s / 451

Circus rheology: Chang and Eng—or: The trapped augmcnter

explicitly proclaimed than it is on the variety stage: no mirrors,
no glass, no optical illusions—only pure, obscene nature. Here
the real twin has pushed himself into the umbilical field, asserting
his presence against liberating recastings. Without any palliative
veil, the observer has the sacred bondage of the chosen in view.
For the conjoined, the way out into psychological banality,
which is open to all normal individuals, is blocked; they are
condemned to constant accompaniment, just as the mystic is
chronically defenseless against the God who floods him or dries
him out as He pleases. Life under possession by a genius that
does not keep its distance is monstrous. The grown-on second—

452 / Buobies

docs he not represent what should never have become visible,
not now, not here, and not in so recalcitrantly corporeal a shape?
It isplacentophany as a brother staggering along at ones side. At
least the macabre comedy of the sight acts as a sheltering
incognito for the monster, “making us look, I suppose, like a
pair of drunken dwarfs supporting each other.” 35

In the third and fourth parts of his novel The Man Without
Qualities , Robert Musil adopts the motif of the Siamese twins as
a metaphor for fusionary eros. The Siamese bond appears here
in a completely dematerialized and internalized form, admittedly,
acting as a symbolic pointer in an epic exploration of the con¬
dition of possibility of intimacy between partners who seduce
each other into an excessive openness to one another. The fact
that the poles of Musil s fusion experiment, Agathe and Ulrich,
are biological siblings is only a literary, not a psychological
necessity. Musil does not neglect to locate the starting points of
the merging process as far apart as he can: the two siblings—
who are also of different ages, not being actual twins—had
lived separately and had lost sight of each other, emotionally as
well as literally, for many years. It was only the death of their
father that provided the occasion for a renewed encounter,
which would mark the beginning of a boldly constructed
magnetopathic-incestuous liaison. The sibling bond between
Ulrich and Agathe is necessary for Musils narrative economy for
two reasons: firsdy, to provide the simplest and most plausible
explanation for the simultaneously erotic and symbiotic a priori
attraction between the two, and secondly, to examine the
question of the boundaries of eros using an exceptional and ille¬
gitimate case of sibling love. In the process, the search for a

Soul Pai'titons /453

Leonardo da Vinci, Lcda and the Swan (derail). Her four children have hatched from
the rvvo eggs.

454 / Bubbles

thousand-year kingdom for two emerges as a violation of the
basic law of all societal formation. It is not without reason that
the cycle of chapters on the siblings in Musils magnum opus
was meant to bear the title “The Criminals” [Die Verbrecher \.
Agathe and Ulrich have to be siblings so that the equivalence
between incest and mystical communion becomes apparent.
For, just as the genealogical order of society as a system of
distances and differences could not remain in force if there were
sexual relations between mothers and sons, fathers and daugh¬
ters or brothers and sisters, so too reality could not establish
itself as an overarching symbolic institution if that mystical
temptation which seeks to liquidate the institutionalized dis¬
tance between subject and object were to gain the upper hand.
Indiscretion—or refusal of distinction—is the ontological crime
to which all generally binding constructions of reality, all ethical
worldviews, object. Even if individuals always long to merge
into the undifferentiated on some level, culture is based on the
categorical imperative of discretion: thou shalt distinguish! And
thou shalt view the first distinctions as absolutely valid laws,
even if it seems to you that the law, like the emperor in the
fairy tale, is naked—or willful and indifferent, which amounts
to the same. All constituted conceptions of the world are rejec¬
tions of undifferentiatedness. At the same time, an anarchic
de-differentiating tendency can be expected among countless
individuals. Indifference towards everything accounts for more
than half of mysticism. The devil-may-care attitude that takes
the end of the world into consideration as a permanendy current
solution to all problems of reality is not only a specialty of the
Austrian social character. Ontological anarchism is a temptation
that is found, at least in traces, in all advanced civilizations and

Sou) Parti: ons / 455

all milieus of achievement. Musils essayist art imagines itself as
an experiment to investigate the difference between an existence
that remains trapped and sheltered within valid distinctions,
and one in which constitutional differences are abandoned to
dissolution. This can only lead to a permanent conflict between
the normal condition and the “other condition.” Musils great
theme is the rivalry between the realistic and mystical modes of
existence. In the novels universe, as we know, Ulrich, the man
without qualities, figures as the living intersection between the
discrete and indiscrete forms of being. His supposed lack of
qualities marks the life-practically impossible position on the
boundary between pure observation and absolute participation.
His idea of sibling love takes into consideration the utopian
coincidence of epochi and fusion:

(Ulrich): “The moment you’re ready to go all out into the
middle of something, you find yourself washed back to the
periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences!” [...]
(Agathe): “So your experience tells you that one can never
really act with conviction and will never be able to. By con¬
viction,” she explained, “I don’t mean whatever knowledge or
moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling
entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling
replete now where there’s emptiness, something one starts out
from and returns to—” [...]

“You mean just what we were talking about,” Ulrich
answered gently. “And you’re also the only person I can talk to
about these things. [...] I’d have to say, rather, that being at
the inner core of things, in a state of unmarred 'inwardness’—
using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the

456 / Bubbles

meaning we just gave it—is apparently not a demand that can
he satisfied by rational thinking.” He had leaned forward and
was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes.
“Human nature is probably averse to it,” he said in a low
voice. “All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it!
Perhaps its connected with the need for sibling love, an addi¬
tion to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction
toward a love unmixed with otherness and not-loving” [...]
“Wed have to be Siamese twins ” Agathe managed to say . 36

Sou Partitions / 457

Excursus 6

Spheric Mourning

On Nobject Loss and the Difficulty of
Saying What Is Missing

Richer treasure earth has none
Than I once possessed—

Ah! so rich, that when ’twas gone
Worthless was the rest.

— J. W. von Goethe, “To the Moon” 37

If psychologists were still allowed to speak in openly mythological
forms—they have never stopped doing so in coded forms any¬
way—they could, in order to pinpoint the theoretical and
therapeutic nuisance of the depressive or melancholic disposi¬
tion, take refuge in the formulation that melancholia is the
mental trace of a single twilight of the gods. The advantage of
this wording would be that of explaining the melancholic-
depressive disorder with an authentic bereavement in the
subject s immediate vicinity, which would also deprive the sup¬
posed structural difference between mourning and melancholia,
to which Sigmund Freud assigned considerable importance in his
frequently interpreted essay of 1916, of much of its theoretical
attraction. Then the melancholic would first of all be a mourner

469

like everyone else, except thar the loss he had suffered would go
beyond the usual interpersonal separations. It would be the
genius or intimate god that had been lost in the individual twi¬
light of the gods, not simply a profane relative or lover;
mourning a lost beloved person would only take on aspects of
melancholia if this person had simultaneously been the genius of
the abandoned individual. Both the loss of the genius and the
loss of an intimate partner constitute psychologically real, and
thus objective bereavements, and the task of a psychology that
knows anything about spheric laws is certainly not to play off
the reality of one against the unreality of the other, but rather to
establish the psychodynamic causes for the subjective equiva¬
lence between the loss of a life partner and the loss of a genius.
Psychology can only identify itself as the science of distributing
subjectivity through its competence in describing inner circum¬
stances according to their own laws. If—with all the necessary
methodological and ideological reserves—it described melan¬
cholia as a chronic form of mourning for a lost genius, it would
be defining the nature of the depressive-melancholic disorder as
a form of individual-atheistic crisis: in a religious culture, the
melancholic would be an individual who had extended the offi¬
cial doctrine of “God exists” with the private, subversive and
rebellious addition “but He is unable to animate me” That is
why, in the Old European metaphysical tradition, problem¬
laden images of the genius’ withdrawal to zones remote from the
world and from God could become suggestive; it is no coinci¬
dence that Dante and Milton, with their portraits of the gloomy
Satan, practically developed official views of the original mental
illness: having a different opinion from God. In an atheistic
culture, on the other hand, the melancholic individual would be

460 / Bubbles

a subject that had augmented the officially licensed thesis “God
is dead” with the private addendum “and my own ally is also
dead”—though it would hardly matter at first whether these
private thoughts affects the subject consciously or unconsciously.
Depressive impoverishment is the exact depiction of the state of
no longer having anything to say after the removal of the most
important augmenter; that is why, in the ancient world, real
melancholia was primarily the illness of the banished and the
uprooted who had lost their families and ritual contexts through
wars and pestilence. But regardless of whether an individual is
forced to go without the cult of its gods or its divine partner, the
depressive-melancholic subject embodies the certainty of the
genius' no-longer-being. Falling prey to melancholia means
nothing other than devoting oneself with undivided intensity of
belief to the conscious or unconscious statement that 1 have
been abandoned by my intimate patron, accomplice and moti¬
vator. Melancholia constitutes the pathology of exile in its pure
form—the impoverishment of the inner world through the
withdrawal of the life-giving field of closeness. In this sense, the
melancholic person would be a heretic of the faith in his lucky
star—an atheist in relation to his own genius, or the invisible
double who should have convinced him of the unsurpassable
advantage of being himself and no one else. The abandoned
subject responds to the experience of a metaphysical deception
with the deepest resentment: it was seduced into life by the great
intimate other, only to be given up by it halfway. Faced with the
melancholic sorrow over the lost animator, the therapy—
remaining in the mythological mode—would consist of
strengthening the isolated subject’s potential for a renewed faith
in the possibility of mental augmentation. This can essentially

Spheric Mourning / 461

occur in three ways: the therapist can offer himself to the patient
as a temporary substitute genius, as necessarily occurs in the
demanding transference relationships of long analyses; he can
make the mourner aware of a higher-ranking non-deceased god,
as is customary in pastoral-theological counseling and sect com¬
munications* 38 The third variation would involve the subject
allowing itself to be initiated into the use of non-religious, non¬
intimate self-augmentation techniques. Andy Warhol brought
out the central features of this:

The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever
emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go.
Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just
meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into
a good tape it’s not a problem anymore. An interesting problem
was an interesting tale. Everybody knew that [...l. 39

Not really everybody. As long as the reformulation of mental
problems as media problems is not generally accepted as an
autotherapeutic rule, the two older, essentially individual-theo¬
logical methods seem to be the only viable ones in the treatment
of the melancholic disorder—with the inevitable consequence
that human listeners have to be introduced instead of techno¬
logical measuring devices. In a thoroughly psychologized
civilization, however, priestly counsel also becomes increasingly
obsolete, or it transforms itself into a religiously-cloaked psycho¬
therapeutic service, with the result that this service is left as the
only form of personal care for melancholia. The methodological
problem with the genuinely psychological approach, however, is
that its basic doctrines, especially the Freudian ones, operate

462/Bubbles

under a total ban on speaking mythologically, which is why it
rejects the possibility of defining the treatment of melancholia as
the restoring of faith in the genius or a higher divine represen¬
tative—or as the bestowal of spiritual meaning on empirical
abandonment. It must therefore gloss the bereavement from which
the melancholic patients are suffering in a non-mythological
language, and is condemned to developing a psychological
notion of healing without drawing on the concept of the
regained faith in the genius—with the result that initially, and
in reality until the end, it can no longer say what the melan¬
cholics lost property is actually supposed to be. This inevitable
encryption of a basic psychological circumstance that was pre¬
viously very easily formulated, albeit not at all easy to analyze,
was demonstrated by Freud with impressive circumspection in
his well-known essay on mourning and melancholia:

In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the
reaction to the loss of a loved object. Where the exciting causes
are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more
ideal kind. [...] In yet other cases one feels justified in main¬
taining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one
cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the
more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously
perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even
if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his
melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has
lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that
melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is
withdrawn from consciousness [...]. 40

Scheme Mourning /463

The excommunication of mythological and poetic formulations
forces psychoanalytical discussion of the melancholic psyche
into the interesting semantic maneuver of having to describe the
severing of the relationship with the constitutive other with ref¬
erences to the patients “object loss.” This operation is
informative because it is doomed to fail, yet never becomes
futile: its relative success will be measured by its ability to locate
the moment of failure ever later, so that before its termination it
will bring to light a wealth of previously unseen and unspoken
connections from the field of interwoven consubjectivities.
Freud himself took the first step in this direction in his afore¬
mentioned essay, in which he presented far-reaching hypotheses
on the intricate nature of the melancholic attachment to the lost
object. What is decisive here is that the analyst arrives at the
view that the melancholic, like every mourner, initially “with¬
draws” his “libido”—imagined as his private capital of sexually
directed life energy—from the lost object into the ego; not to
invest it in a new love object, however, but to tie itself in a far
more radical way—though Freuds premises do not make it clear
exactly how this is to happen—to the lost old object. Emotion¬
al bankruptcy and utmost impoverishment of the soul are the
inevitable consequences of this. The formula is now: “identifi¬
cation of the ego with the abandoned object.” 41 This
nonsensical clinging to the ruinous libido investment is tenta¬
tively defined explained as follows:

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the lat¬
ter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though
it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object loss
was transformed into an ego loss [...]. 42

464 / Bubbles

If one bears in mind that this refers to the silent tragedy we have
summarized in the mythological-poetic notion of the loss of the
genius, one is struck first of all by the objectifying tendency of
these formulations. Nonetheless, one can hold the view that the
danger of reification that appears with such discourses is amply
balanced out by the gain in differentiation in the interpretation
of the melancholic subjects self-relationship. This now appears
in a light in which the couple relation with the intimate second
element transpires as internally doubled: what the real other
means to the subject is repeated in the subject with reference to
itself. Thus the subject is simultaneously itself and the trace of all
its experiences in dealing with the other. If the real other is
really lost, its “shadow,” as Freud mysteriously puts it, falls upon
the ego. In technical psychoanalytical discourses, what exactly
happens in this ego umbration is outlined with more or less
fabulous, often very complicated interpretations whose only firm
essence in all cases is the claim that the subject, to its own detri¬
ment, yearns to live on in an oversized, illusory, ambiguous and
possibly also hate- and guilt-ridden, but certainly immature,
proximity to the indispensable object. It seems that under these
conditions, the essential other cannot be lost without the subject
being deprived of fundamental aspects of its own life—unless it
had already trained itself to lose the other in such a way that its
disappearance would not be followed by ego loss. The nuisance
of melancholia for the formation of psychoanalytical theories and
its underlying individualistic and thing-ontological dogmatism is
that, in melancholic loss, something undeniably vanishes that,
according to the theoretical model, should not exist in the first
place: an object that never really was one, as it is so intimately
close to the subject that for the latter to be left behind alone in

Sphere Mourning / 465

an intact state after the withdrawal of the former proves a psy¬
chological impossibility. Hence the melancholic does not lose
the object as the rules would have it, namely in such a way that
he is left in fine as the winner of the separation, existentially free
for new libido investments and symbolically inspired to creative
lament; rather, with the “object,” he would lose the most signifi¬
cant part of his communicative and musical-erotic competence.
This makes it clear, however, why the concept of object loss is
out of place here. In a correctly understood conception of the
object, this clear demarcation from a subject must already be
implicit so that a real object loss, in the precise sense of the
phrase, could under no circumstances cast doubt on the egos
enduring presence. In an objective duet, the first violin can pro¬
cure a replacement for the second if the latter has disappeared
owing to some incident. In the pre-objective or constitutive
duets of life, however, the playing of the one is always that of the
other too, and if the incipient subject were deprived of its
counterpart the music would die, for the compositions are not
differentiated to the point of objectivity and the instruments
have not crystallized to the point of being independently
playable. If torn out of the rehearsal context, the single player
cannot simply continue his part acontextually somewhere else. A
meaningful psychological theory of this relationship would
therefore suggest that one should view the melancholic as an
involuntary soloist, left without a piece, an instrument and the
animating force of practice after his separation from the consti¬
tutive duet partner. The references to object loss show that in
their first attempts to speak within the vague field of archaic
dualities, psychologists were not able to understand their own
words; for objects in the psychological sense can only exist once

466 / Bubolss

the pieces and instruments can be separated from the players
without causing them to lose their performative potential. If it is
productive to take into consideration something like the exis¬
tence of psychological objects, then only if these are defined as
relationship poles that can be replaced and transposed by the ego
without acute self-impoverishment. Only something that can be
occupied and let go is an object. What we call psychological
objectivity is born from a crystallization of dialogic competence
to form a repertoire that can also be played with other partners. The
strong characteristic of the psychological object is its losability—or
its replaceability and the replayability of the rehearsed piece with
other partners, which amounts to the same in this case. Con¬
versely, an object that has not (yet) crystallized as losable,
abandonable, replaceable and translatable cannot constitute an
object in the psychological sense.

We shall refer to this unabandonable intimate something,
without whose presence and resonance the subject cannot be
complete, using the term coined by Thomas Macho, as the
nobject. 43 Nobjects are things, media or persons that fulfill the
function of the living genius or intimate augmenter for subjects.
These elements, which were often thought of as outer souls in
the pre-psychological tradition, should, even in a psychologized
culture, by no means be viewed in terms of the thing-form,
as this would postulate or presuppose a separability from the
subject—or rather the pre-subject—that precisely cannot be
attained from a psychological perspective as long as the subject is
still in its formative stages. It will only learn its transferability
once it has achieved mastery of its own part in formative duets
and constitutive trios (we need not speak of the quartets and
quintets here). If the nobject augmenters are torn from the hearts

Spheric Mourning / 467

of the individuals prematurely, however, whether by a higher
power or the higher overpowering that operates ubiquitously in
trivial misery, the depressive-melancholic disorder is the nobject-
amputated individual s adequate response to the withering of its
mental field. Hence the core of that consubjectivity which psy¬
chological theory would have to reconstruct appears neither in
straightforward relationships between subjects and objects nor in
affective transactions among subjects, but only in those subject-
nobject unities which are ahead of all other material and
communicative activities as resonating cells of the mental metabo¬
lism. One should, incidentally—as intimated above—cancel out
the term “subject” or “ego” with a corresponding negative, as it
too displays the mistaken postulate of separability from its aug¬
mented and allies; so one should speak of a pre-subject or n(ego),
a terminological tendency that can indeed be observed in the
after-ripened psychoanalytical discourses of the last generation.

A portion of the thoughts the nobject concept provokes were
already addressed by Jacques Lacan in his well-known lecture
series The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, given from 1959 to 1960, in
which, speaking of “the thing” {la Chose), he sought to articulate
a pre-objective psychological object. Its primary aspect, he stated,
was that it must always be considered lost, yet its absence is
always in the subjects best interests. Lacans brilliant reflections
on la Chose —in whose concept we hear an overtone series reaching
from Meister Eckarts concept of God to Kants thing-in-itself—
are riddled with irresolvable ambiguities that make it impossible
to filter out precisely which aspects point towards an analysis of
nobjectal communions and which aim for the edifying, psycho-
analytically and psycho-hygienically renewed Pauline doctrine of

4687 Bubbles

Spheric Mousing / 469

Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz pose for che photographer Julian Weasser in the
Pasadena Art Museum, 1963 (derail)

the prohibition that enables desire. What remains unacceptable,
however, is the invasiveness with which Lacans affirmation of the
ban on incest, whose discussion draws attention to his Catholicism,
turns into an idiosyncratic tragic anthropology: here the “loss of
the mother”—whatever that might mean—is declared a universal
human fate on an archaic level. All humans appear as creatures
with equally good reason to become melancholics, for let us face
facts: we are all mother-amputees. All men are equal before the
unattainability of the Chose . You think you have been robbed of
more than others? Not at all: look around you, we are all but
orphans of the Chose. As strong spirits, however, we would do
well to accept that loneliness begins in the cradle! With this
leveling of psychotic and neurotic conditions into universal
human patienthood, psychoanalysis a la parisienne abandons its

attention to mental suffering and the need for help, instead
turning into a philosophical schola of a neo-ancient variety.
Lacans stoical-surrealistic ethics aims for the refutation of thera¬
peutic hope: you have not been helped until you comprehend
that no one can help you. If one draws the appropriate conclu¬
sions from this message, then the third way of treating
melancholic disorders—the therapeutic one—also proves a dead
end. My genius is dead, and the thing I took for my helper as his
temporary replacement has turned out to be a talking dummy. Is
this a reason to despair? At the exit of Lacans practice, Warhol is
waiting with his tape recorder. “When a problem transforms
itself into a good tape its not a problem anymore. [...] Every¬
body knew that.” Word gets around. Where there was
disconsolation, there will now be media performance.

470 / Bubbles

Excursus 7

On the Difference Between an Idiot
and an Angel

It is the shared achievement of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche to have
introduced the concept of the idiot into modern religious dis¬
course. The significance of this term becomes clear as soon as one
distinguishes it from that of the angel, as whose opposite and con¬
trast agent it gains its value. What an angel is, and how it
intervenes in profane life: the Old European religious tradition
developed this question in a thousand variations according to its
curiosity and hunger for images. It remained the task of the
greatest psychological novelist of the nineteenth century and the
author of The Anti-Christy however, to understand that there is also
an idiot figure which affects human life. For both writers the word
“idiot” is Christologically charged, as both take a chance in prob¬
ing—albeit from opposite perspectives—the typological secret of
saviordom using the adjective “idiotic.” This is a religion-psycho-
logically explosive undertaking, for all known attempts to deduce
the appearance of redemptive figures had inevitably drawn on the
angel or messenger model, that is, the notion that an envoy would
appear to mortals with a transcendent message and liberate them
from physical need and moral deviance as a savior-hero. Hence
the savior is initially merely a heightened form of messenger—it

471

was only with Hellenized Christology that the categorial leap took
place whereby the messenger now no longer brought the message,
but rather was the message. In its heyday, the messenger or angel
schema was clearly powerful enough to support the savior doc¬
trine. To establish the savior as the messenger of all messengers,
Christian theologians had to make him the son of substance and
proclaim him the only fully adequate sign of being. 44 It testifies to
the capacity of the angeletic 45 model that it was capable of taking
this strain. Classical Christology shows the metaphysics of the
envoy and the message at the height of its power. It belongs to a
world situation and state of theory that was characterized by the
dogma of the strong sender. Perhaps the discursive structure we
were accustomed to calling “metaphysics” was actually no more
than a reflex to subordinate thought to the notion of a being that,
as the absolute sender, has the monopoly on all thrones, forces
and powers, along with their associated signs and mediators. In
this absolute being-a-sender, it was possible for the God of the
Bible and the God of the philosophers to converge.

If one agrees here on the formula that the Modern Age is an
information process that forces the crisis of sender metaphysics,
one already has the means to understand why a rime-sensitive
theology after Gutenberg can no longer rely on an angeletic
doctrine of the savior as an envoy. In the modern multiplication
of sender forces and the messenger inflation on the free message
market, a hyper-messenger of the “savior god” type, made mani¬
fest by his apostolic representatives, cannot assert his position of
feudal primacy. In future, anyone who wishes to have a liberating
effect on humans in a specific sense must be not so much an
envoy with a transcendent message as a human being whose
directly evident otherness fully replaces the bringer of news from

472 7 Bjcbes

beyond in a real presence. It is a sign of Dostoyevsky’s religion-
philosophical brilliance that he was the first to recognize the
chance to shift the focus of Christology from angeletics to idiotics
and thought it through to its limits. 46 Precisely because the
modern world is so full with the noise made by the messengers of
power parties and the artistic hullabaloo of geniuses drawing atten¬
tion to their works and delusional systems, religious difference can
no longer be highlighted convincingly in the messenger mode.
The present God-man cannot reach the mortals as a messenger,
but only as an idiot. The idiot is an angel without a message—an
undistanced, intimate augmenter of all coincidentally encoun¬
tered beings. His entrance is like the appearance of a
phenomenon; not because he invokes a transcendent radiance in
the earthly real, but because he embodies an unforeseeable naivetd
and disarming benevolence in the midst of a society of role play¬
ers and ego strategists. When he speaks, it is never with authority,
only with the force of his openness. Though a prince by lineage,
he is a human without signs of his status—he belongs unre¬
servedly to the modern world; for while hierarchy is characteristic
of the angel, the idiot is marked by an egalitarian streak. (Hierar¬
chies of angels go without saying, but hierarchies of idiots would
be baffling.) He moves among humans of high and low society
like a big child who never learned to calculate its own advantage.

Starting from these modern religion-aesthetic findings—let us
not forget that Dostoyevsky had conceived the figure of the idiot
as an attempt to depict the “completely beautiful human
being” and his inevitable failure amid human ugliness—Nietzsche
drew the corresponding religion-psychological conclusions in
his polemic The Antichrist of 1888. For him, the historical Jesus
can already be summed up in Dostoyevskyan typology—in

On the Difference Between an idiot and an Anao*. / 473

Nietzsches terminology, he is the incarnation of a decadent
avant la lettre .

It is a pity that there was no Dostoyevsky living near this most
interesting decadent, I mean someone with an eye for the dis¬
tinctive charm that this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness
and childishness has to offer. 47

Consequently, all characterizations that seek to project the lan¬
guage of heroism and genius culture onto the historical Jesus—or
the language of fanaticism and apostolic-apologetic arrogance—
are unsuitable; all these simply express the anger of
representatives and ambitions of succession. As far as the con¬
crete type of the evangelistic savior is concerned, one should
finally approach him with the only applicable medical category:
“The rigorous language of physiology would use a different word
here: the word ‘idiot/” 48

The sublime, the childlike and the sick—in his turbulent
polemic against Christianity, Nietzsche does not take the time to
unravel the riddle of how these aspects could come together in a
single qualifier, namely “idiotic,” to the great disadvantage of
divinity and general psychology. If one wished to piece Dos¬
toyevsky’s and Nietzsches intuitions about the equation of
idiotology and savior doctrine together patiendy, it would produce
a far-reaching revision of traditional notions of religious process.

In standard angeletic systems, the savior appears to humans as
a metaphysical informant and moves them, adopting the attitude
of sender-reinforced strength, with his penetrating message. In the
idiotic system, on the other hand, the savior is a nobody without
any higher client behind him. His statements are viewed by those

474 / EuODles

around him as childlike trivialities, and his presence is perceived
as non-binding and incidental. Dostoyevsky makes this trait in
particular absolutely clear; of one figure in the novel, Ganya y he
writes: “He behaved exactly as though he were alone in his room
and made no attempt to keep up appearances before Myshkin, as
though he looked upon him as absolutely of no consequence.” 49
Nonetheless, the presence of Prince Myshkin is a trigger for all
events that take place in his vicinity; he decisively catalyzes the
characters and fates of those who encounter him. It is precisely as
a non-messenger that he solves the problem of access to the inside
of his opponents with a method that no one can see through. Nei¬
ther siren nor angel, he unlocks the ears of his conversational
partners and their centers of mental activity. Nor is it his childlike
character in the ordinary sense that gives him his special access to
others, unless one gave the word “childlike” a heterodox meaning:
it could refer to the willingness to interact with others without
asserting ones own self, instead keeping oneself available as the
augmenter of the other. If such a possibility of childlikeness
solidifies into a general attitude, the result is what Dostoyevsky
articulated with the word “idiocy”—a word that was clearly only
meant to sound pejorative in its most superficial usage. With the
title “idiot,” Dostoyevsky pinpoints, as a philosopher of religion
and a critic of subjectivism, an ego position that he considers
noble and—at least in relation to others—salvific, though it can
in no sense be attributed to an angeletic potency. The idiotic
subject is evidently the one that can act as if it were not so much
itself as its own double, and potentially the intimate augmenter of
every encountered other. There is a rough saying in various can¬
tons of Switzerland, “it looks like they brought up the afterbirth
instead of the child in your case,” and one should perhaps take

On tt>3 Diflcrcnco Between an Idiot and an Angsl / 475

this as a psychological discovery. The idiot placentalizes himself by
offering an inexplicable experience of closeness to everyone who
crosses his path, like some intrauterine cushion—a sort of
immemorial connection which creates an openness between peo¬
ple who have never met before that may otherwise only be found
at the Last Judgment or in the wordless exchange between fetus
and placenta. In the presence of the idiot, harmless good-natured¬
ness becomes transforming intensity; his mission is seemingly to
have no message, but rather to create a closeness in which con¬
toured subjects can dissolve their boundaries and remold
themselves. His morality is the inability to hit back. This is the
aspect that had to interest Nietzsche about supposed Jesuan idiocy,
as it embodies the ideal of a noble life free of all resentment—
albeit not on the part of the active self, but rather the companion,
the patron, the augmenter. This would mean a noble idiocy that
expressed itself in a pre- and superhuman availability and willing¬
ness to serve. The idiotic savior would be the one who did not
lead his life as the main character in his own story, but had rather
exchanged places with his afterbirth in order to make space for its
being-in-the-world as itself. Is this a pathological excess of loyalty?
A case of prenatal Nibelung loyalty? A delirium of yolk and
cushions in which the subject confuses itself with the archaic
patron and spirit of closeness? Perhaps the idiots wisdom lies in
the fact that he descends to his intimate waste, the placental
sister, in her forlornness? Would he rather continue her life for
her than betray their common origins in a state of augmented
floating-together? “Unless you become like children,..?” Perhaps
Jesus should rather have said: “Unless you become like this
idiotically friendly thing...”?

476 / Buboles

CHAPTER 7

The Siren Stage

On the First Sonospheric Alliance

I have really become hard only by thin layers;

If anyone knew how marrowy I am at bottom.

I am gong and cotton and snowy song,

I say so and am sure of it.

— Henri Michaux, “1 am Gong’ 1

Where do I call You to come to, since I am in You? Or where
else are You that You can come to me? [...] So speak that I may
hear, Lord, my heart is listening; open it that it may hear Thee
say to my soul I am thy salvation . Hearing that word, let me
come in haste to lay hold upon thee.

— Saint Augustine, Confessions , Book I, II & V 2

In the beginning, the accompanied animals, humans, are sur¬
rounded by something that can never appear as a thing. They are
initially the invisibly augmented, the corresponding, the encom¬
passed and, if there is disarray, those who have been abandoned
by their companions. That is why investigating humans philo¬
sophically means, first and foremost: examining paired

477

structures, both obvious and Jess visible ones, those that are lived
with congenial partners and those that create alliances with
problematic and unattainable others. Only the ideologiaperennis
that drifts in the mainstream of individualistic abstraction speaks
of the unaccompanied single person. Psychology may cultivate its
twin research, and social science will continue to chase its
chimera, homo sociologies ; pair research and the theory of the
dual space are constitutive for the philosophically reformulated
science of mankind. Even what newer philosophers have termed
“human existing” is thus no longer to be understood as the soli¬
tary individual standing out into the indeterminate openness,
nor as the mortals private suspendedness in nothingness; existing
is a paired floating with the second element, whose closeness
maintains the tension of the microsphere. My existence includes
the presence of a pre-objective something floating around me; its
purpose is to let me be and support me. Hence I am not, as cur¬
rent systemists and bio-ideologues claim I think, a living being in
its environment; I am a floating being with whom geniuses form
spaces. “If anyone knew how marrowy I am at bottom.”

How can we understand the nature of this marrowy softness?
How can the same voice speak of itself as cotton and snow song,
yet also the gong that echoes with the unbearable? It seems that
our journey through the nobjectal zones has still not touched on
the innermost ring. For even if it can be made plausible that
humans, both in archaic horde formation and in times of classical
empires and modern project cultures, are spheric beings that only
master life’s hazards in the world $ openness in the interplay with
their augmenters, companions and pursuers, this still does not
articulate the mystery of their receptiveness to the encourage¬
ment of their creatures of closeness. Let us admit it: the genius

478/ 8ubol3S

does not seek, it has found; the angel does not knock on the door,
it is in the room; the daimonion does not ask to be announced, it
already has the subjects ear! But how, in these intimate circum¬
stances of partition, can the one have assured itself of the other $
disclosedness beforehand? On what store do the prestabilized inti¬
macies that enable an unhindered transmission of feelings
between the inseparably connected parties draw? How can it be
that for billions of messages, I am a rock on which their waves
break without resonance, while certain voices and instructions
unlock me and make me tremble as if I were the chosen instru¬
ment to render them audible, a medium and mouthpiece simply
for their urge to sound? Is there not still a mystery of access to
consider here? Does my accessibility to certain unrefusable mes¬
sages not have its dark “reason” in an ability to reverberate that has
not yet been adequately discussed? How is the standing-open that
enables Socrates to hear his demon intervening in his monologues
with admonitions possible virtually a priori ? And what of that
obliging receptiveness, 3 termed “immaculate,” that allows the
angel of annunciation—which usually enters from the left—to
speak the impossible news in Marys ear without her submission
turning into refusal? On what wavelength is the speech broadcast
that puts you in a state of unreserved resonance, and whose audi¬
tion makes the ear open and swell up, as if it were suddenly
involved in ardently singing a hymn whose sounds contain its ear¬
liest and most recent expectations?

If one inquires as to the most elemental and interior layers of
mental accessibility, one must also desire to know how to re¬
disarm a hearing sense that has become hard, careful and narrow.
From a psychoacoustic perspective, the shift to intimate listening is
always connected to a change of attitude from a one-dimensional

The Siren Stage / 479

alarm- and distance-oriented listening to a polymorphously
moved floating listening. This change reverses the general ten¬
dency to move from a magical, proto-musical listening to one
revolving around alarm and concern—or, to put it in more
enlightened terms: from uncritical participation to critical aware¬
ness. Perhaps history itself is a titanic battle for the human ear in
which nearby voices struggle with distant ones for privileged
access to emotional movedness [ Ergriffenheit ], 4 the voices of the
mighty with those of the counter-mighty. Using gestures
claiming the right to move, power has always presented itself as
truth; in the refusal to be moved, however, one sees a laboriously
acquired strategic cunning which knows that the gullible ear also
takes in lies. Those who become wise distance themselves from
Cretans, priests, politicians and representatives.

Through resistance, the subject posits itself as the power
point of a non-movedness. By the psychohistorical standards of
the last two-and-a-half millennia, only those who have subjected
themselves to comprehensive de-fascination training can be con¬
sidered adults. This training is meant to take the subject to the
threshold from which it can have unmoved dealings with con¬
sent-demanding rhetorical and artistic demonstrations. That the
ear too is taught to separate spirits and favors shows the tension
that advanced civilizations have to maintain in their carriers in
order to combine an increased openness to the world with a
heightened non-seducibility. Critical subjectification is based on
de-fascination as a restraining of movedness. Since written cul¬
ture successfully asserted its law, being a subject has primarily
meant this: being able, initially and usually, to resist the images,
texts, speeches and musics one encounters, except for those
which, for some reason, have already been granted the right to

480 1 Bubbles

The S 'en Stage / 4Qi

Red-figured vase from Void, 5 th cenrury BC. The Sirens fly around Odysseus as
birdlike women.

force my agreement and attunement—we call them icons, holy
books, writings of the fathers, hymns and classics. In these, we
recognize the culture-bearing potentials to convince, which have
passed the examination of critique often enough to be allowed to
disarm even us, the present carriers of denial, to a certain extent.
“Convincing" is merely a name for post-critical movedness—it
indicates the return of the affirmative judgment at the heights of
self-reflection. It is not only the official dogmas of shared, mature
convincing that have the license to circumvent our barriers of
distance, however; in effect, enchantments from sources that are
questionable or frowned upon can suspend our basic right to lis¬
ten without applauding, turning us into degenerate listeners.
Should we simply shrug our shoulders and allow whatever peo¬
ple like? Perhaps it would be useful to remember that higher

culture can only exist for as long as it manages to produce suffi¬
cient numbers of individuals who feel a need to defend the
distinction between hypotheses and enchantments.

In the twelfth book of the Odyssey , Homer depicts the primal
scene of the old musical overpowering and a new form of resis¬
tance against it. Odysseus, whom the gods want finally to
complete his homeward voyage, receives the advice from the sor¬
ceress Circe, his lover for a year, to beware the deadly seduction
of the Sirens song while at sea. Odysseus now tells his comrades
about this as they journey:

The prophecies of Circe are not meant
for one or two of us; they must be shared,
my friends: beforehand, know that we may meet death
or may, escaping destiny, be spared.

Above all, Circe urges us to flee

the song of the beguiling Sirens and

their flowered meadow. I alone—she says—

may hear their voices. Tie me then hard fast—

use knots I cant undo. HI stand erect,

feet on the socket of the mast; and let

the rope ends coil around the shaft itself;

and if I plead with you to set me free,

add still more ropes and knots most carefully. (XII, 154—164) 5

What is the source of Homer s conviction that the Sirens bring
death to all men wirh their song? How does the bard even know
about the existence of these bewitching creatures—there are ini¬
tially only two, it seems 6 —and by what spells do they manage to

482 / Bubbles

tempt the unadvised? What charms do the deadly songbirds in
womens guise employ to make all who hear them lose their
minds? What do the Sirens know about their victims that enables
them to get so close to them? How do the two voluptuous singers
penetrate their listeners ears so deeply that they gained this
reputation: “Whoever, unaware, comes close and hears the
Sirens' voice will nevermore draw near his wife, his home, his
infants: he'll not share such joys again.” And why in the world is
it that “round about them lie heaped bones and shriveled skin of
putrefying men”? (XII, 40-46) What fear, what experience and
what imagination were able to create this association of song and
destruction among the Greek myth-tellers? Even if most of these
questions cannot be answered with certainty as far as Homers
views and their sources are concerned, the Siren episode in the
Odyssey does make one thing clear: the early patriarchal Homeric
world learned to fear a particular kind of aural magic. Not every¬
thing that reaches the ears of seamen can be perceived by them
as a music that consoles them or transports them home. Now
that the men who have traveled far and hear much have become
more numerous, we must consider a state of the world in which
even our ears must be prepared for deadly deceptions. The ear,
which is by nature the organ of gullible devotion to all things
associated with the mother tongue, the fatherland and the house¬
hold muses, can be fooled by songs that sound more attractive
than what is most native to them—and yet, it seems, are the
music of a hostile principle. The Sirens voices create an auditory
suction that disarms batde-tested men and worldly-wise travelers
at the wrong moment; it dupes them with an illusion of being at
home and at ease that before Odysseus, who was better advised
in such matters of sonic enchantment, none had been able to

The Siren Stage / 433

“The Air Full of Notes”—mosaic from Dougga, 300 AD

resist. It is a foreign music in the world, and it is precisely the
most diligent who should beware; for these sounds, as the mythol-
ogists tell us, lead their listeners not to themselves, into their own
well-being, but rather into a death far from home. Death at the
hands of the Sirens comes not in a horrific guise, but as an irre¬
sistibly flattering melody that reaches the innermost ear of each
listener. It is as if a homesickness trap were set up on the high seas,

484 / BubbtcJS

at the flowery Siren coast, a trap that men burn to enter as soon
as they find themselves in the sonic circle of the two womens
voices singing as one. Homer makes an effort to demarcate the
power field of these strange musicians quite clearly: where the
Sirens sing, the wind ceases to blow, and ships glide silently
through the water, driven only by their oars; no sounds of
nature, no roaring of the sea and no flapping sail compete with

T^e Siren Stage / 485

the magical voices for the ears of the victims. The sea turns into an
otherworldly concert hall, the listeners row silently into the divine
sound bell, and the winged singers pour the milk of their voices
into the mens hedonistically opened ears—unless, like those of
Odysseus’ crew, these have been sealed with wax as a precaution.

What kind of music is it, what melody and rhythm, that
gives the Sirens such power over the ears of mortal men? As soon
as one attempts to get closer to the Siren concert, it becomes clear
that the secret of their successful seductions does not lie with the
singers themselves. Certainly the epithet ‘seductive” is associated
with the Sirens as stereotypically as the attribute “almighty” with
the monotheistic God, and being-seductive is ascribed to these
lethal minstrels like a fixed trait. This would make falling prey to
the Sirens the normal consequence of Siren perception, and the
mens striving and pining to reach their clawed feet would be the
most adequate analogue to the charms of those Greek soubrettes.
Are they not, in essence, showing the seamen a little too much
cleavage of their throats? In truth, the seductive element of the
Sirens 5 music does not stem from a nature-like sensuality, as
Adorno still mistakenly supposed. Rather, it seems to be the
nature of these singers not to display any charms of their own;
their concert is not the presentation of a lascivious program that
has, so far, been popular among all who sail past—yet might
already encounter its first critical or indifferent listener tomor¬
row. The secret reason for the irresistibility of the Sirens is that
they, with a peculiar lack of scruples, never perform their own
repertoire, only the music of those who pass by; the very idea of
a melody of their own is foreign to them; even the sweetness of
their voices is not a musical quality irremovably tied to their
performance, and in tradition their voices are more often termed

4667 Bubbles

shrill than beautiful. The Sirens found eager victims in all listeners
up until Odysseus—and especially in him—because they sing
from the listeners own place. Their secret is to render precisely
those songs in which the passing sailors’ ears yearn to immerse
themselves. Listening to Sirens thus means entering the core
space of an intimately touching musical key and wishing to
remain at the source of this indispensable sound from that point
on. The fatal singers compose their songs in the ear of the listener;
they sing through the larynx of the other. Their music is that
which finds the simplest solution to the problem of the accessi¬
bility of otherwise closed ears. With nefarious accuracy, it
performs the exact sonic gestures with which the listening subject
will unlock itself and step forward. For Achilles, had he not fallen
before Troy, the feathered singers would have recited verses to
Achilles whose magnificence would have rendered him defenseless
against his own song; for Agamemnon, if he had passed by, they
would naturally have sung hymns to Agamemnon across the
water, wickedly pleasing and irresistibly glorifying, and how
could the endangered hero not have yielded to the song issuing
from the hill as if from his own interior? The Siren s art is to place
the subject’s own self-arousal into its soul. The meaning of irre¬
sistibility in this case is transporting the subject to the center of
the hymnic emotion that seems to well up in itself and transports
it to a place among the stars. It is not surprising, then, that the
Sirens have prepared carefully attuned hymns to the well-traveled
Odysseus—an odyssey within the odyssey, a musical oasis to
which the hero is invited for a rest, as if he had returned home
after so many strenuous adventures. These compositions are
adapted with such wonderful precision to his hearing, modulated
by many dangers and ordeals, so that it is out of the question for

The .Siren Stage / 487

the recipient of praise not to be moved. The Siren song sings of
him, the approaching, who glides towards his song; he sings
along with what he hears in spontaneous affirmation, as if this
unique listening moment already contained the outcry of his
own singing. Seduction is an awakening of the source of that
melody which is absolutely mine to sing. Homer did not neglect
to include in his tale of Odysseus those Siren verses that simply
had to enchant the hero. These verses would undoubtedly have
caused him to perish on the Sirens* meadows if he had not, tied
to the mast, been rowed through the arousing music funnel by
his wax-deafened comrades.

Remarkable Odysseus, halt and hear
the song we two sing out: Achaean chief,
the gift our voices give is honey-sweet.

No man has passed our isle in his black ship
until hes heard the sweet song from our lips;
and when he leaves, the listener has received
delight and knowledge of so many things.

We know the Argives 1 and the Trojans’ griefs:

their tribulations on the plain of Troy

because the gods had willed it so. We know

all things that come to pass on fruitful earth. (XII, 184-191) 7

Siren music rests on the possibility of being one step ahead of the
subject in the expression of its desire. Perhaps such an ability to
be ahead is the anthropological reason for the interest of non¬
artists in artists, which reached its zenith in modern societies and
passed it in postmodern ones. Thus the Sirens’ song does not
simply move the subject as if from without; it rather sounds as if

488 /Bubbles

the ownmost sentiment of the subject, which now rises up, were
being uttered in perfection and for the first time.

In a so far inexplicable fashion, these singers solved the
problem of access to the subjects center of artistic feeling; it
remains uncanny that they succeed in this not only occasionally,
with isolated individuals, but with many different victims, as if
the ability to infiltrate the human ear that dreams of itself were
not some coincidentally effective intuition, but rather a virtuosi-
cally mastered psycho-technique. For the Greeks of Homers time
and later, such abilities would have been unthinkable without
demigod privileges. To them, the Sirens were like melodic
seeresses—and indeed, mantic farsightedness and divine cognizance
are required in order even to suspect that precisely this dark ship
passing the Siren cliffs holds none other than the cunning
returnee from Troy. If one has this knowledge, it no longer seems
such an impossible leap to the infiltration of the hero’s innermost
ear; for what would a heroic seafarer, his homeward voyage
delayed by fatal winds and female guile, want more to hear about
than the ordeals of his compatriots before Troy, his current trials
and his unknown destiny. With a sure sense of key, the Sirens
immediately render the epic that tells of the hero Odysseus—yet
they sing it not in the style of that people-forming muse which
succeeded in making the name of Odysseus intelligible for the
whole of Greece as the emblem of a new, post-heroic form of
humanity; they sing of the world-famous Odysseus for Odysseus
alone, as if he had lost his horizon and forgotten his project.
They beguile him, as if to say: “Let the Aegean shrink to your
most private body of water! After proving yourself among others
as a hero and making people speak of your deeds among the
deeds of others, there is an inland sea of notes waiting for you

The Siran Slage /489

here in which you alone will be glorified! Abandon the noise of
the world and immerse yourself in your own music, your first
and last!” Let us not forget: even Odysseus resists this song not
because he is able to mobilize the powers to reject it himself, but
only because he has countered the overpowering pull of the
music with the ropes that bind him to the ships mast. Is it mere
coincidence that the Greek name for these ropes scarcely differs
from that of the singers pulling on them from the other side? Did
Homer already know that bonds can only be broken by more
bonds? Was it already clear to him that culture in general, and
music in particular, is essentially nothing other than a division of
labor in bewitching?

Even in the case of Odysseus, then, the Sirens song is com¬
pletely successful: it overcomes the listener as a higher power in
musical form. Only through a cunning division of binding
powers does the hero escape their suction. Nonetheless, there is
no reason to claim that we have correcdy understood the attrac¬
tion of the Siren music. For it is still unclear whither the man
who does not keep still when he hears the Sirens voices, like
every other citizen in the concert hall, but is rather seized by the
overpowering urge to approach these singers physically, is actually
striving to go. What is the nature of this desire to get closer?
What primal scene of being-close might it be that the plunge
towards the singers reenacts? From where does the principle of
transference take effect in the case of this acoustic enchantment?
Only at the second listen does the particularity of the Siren scene
become clear: if such music is irresistibly sweet for this one and
only sung-about and singing listener, it is because it feigns to the
hero that his constitutive wish has been fulfilled. The singers
hold the key to the listening subjects heavenly ascension, and

460 / Bubbles

their method of seduction gives the decisive clue to the intimate
zont; of the hearing sense, which is willingly open to certain
insinuations. Here a successful seduction can be used to deduce
the tendency of the wish itself—and more, namely that the Siren
song as such is the medium in which the wish originally forms.
The song, the wish and the subject have always belonged together.
In truth, the subjectivity of heroic times can only form through
listening to the epic and mythical glorification. In the nurseries
of advanced civilizations, as in most pre-literate societies, the ego
is formed in a promise of song: a future of notes is sent ahead of
the egos own existence. I am a sound image, a verse flash, a
dithyrambic feeling, compressed into a form of address that
already sings to me in my infancy who I can be. The hero and the
heroine: they will be those whom they hear in advance—for life
in the age of heroic subjects is always on the way to versification.
Every subject, as long as it resists discouragement, moves towards
its current musicalization. Only monotheistic priests revel in the
self-referential misconception that man wants to be like God. If
the priests are not in attendance, it transpires that humans desire
not to be like God, but like a hit song. Being on the way to the
rhapsodic moment gives ones existence the feeling for its forward
and upward motion. An immemorial inclination towards
frothing up in the cantilena precedes the ego; its frequency is its
substance. That is why, to this day, tenors and prima donnas can
arouse entire stadiums and make large houses tremble; they show
even the most musically impoverished a simple route to the
frothing of the self in vocal exhibitions. Sursum—boom boom —
and none shall sleep. 8 Pop stars descend even further into the
underworld of ego orgasms at discount prices by simulating their
emergence with jaws locked around the microphone. But tenor

the -Start Stage /491

In anticipation: Werner Schroeter, Willow Springs> 1972

hysteria and pop action would not be so attractive if they did
not still offer touching projections of old powers which lead to
ego formation via the ears. They seduce the listener to the extent
that they plausibly promise the subject s appearance in the song’s
core. The primitive-artistic journey to madness has psychological
method. The listeners’ expectant readiness to leap into the
frothing of their ownmost sonic gesture testifies to the reality of
an archaic, ego-forming siren stage in which the subject hooks
itself into a sonorous phrase, a vocal sound, a sonic image, to
hope from then on for the return of its musical moment. The
aspects of truth that Lacan included in his aimless theorem of
the mirror stage apply not to the visual, but rather the auditory

492 / BuobJes

and audio-vocal self-relationship of the subject. Through its
advance hearing of the ego motif the individual forms a pact
with its own future, from which it draws the joy of living
towards fulfillment. Every unresigned subject lives in the ortho¬
pedic expectation of its most intimate hymn, which will
simultaneously be its triumphal march and its obituary. This is
what makes so many dream of musical appearances and bursting
out in recitation: those who hear their hymns have triumphed.
For the unsung the battle continues, even if Troy has long since
fallen. For them, the truth that the subject comes closest to itself
in the act of intonation still lies ahead. Whoever steps on stage
to present their sounding gesture is not sight-reading, and above
all, knows nothing of self-imager, for in the oral world, the
incipient subjects do not look in the mirror, but rather into the
song—and that part of the song which promises me my emotion
motif, my hymnic rhythm and my self-fanfare. Like most people
today, the early humans did not want to look like something;
they want to sound like something. It took the unleashing of the
modern machinery of images, which has been forcing its
cliches into the populace since the Baroque, to conceal this
basic circumstance and bring the masses under the spell of visual
individualism with its quick views, its mirrors and its fashion
magazines. It is not without reason that the video clip is the
symptomatic genre of contemporary culture, which works
towards a visual gluing-up of the ears and a global synthesis
through images. The old songs of great men and women, by
contrast, are still at home in a regime of sonospheric common
spirits; they erect sounding monuments, halls of fame or
sonorous burial mounds from which the heroes rose to sound on
in the ears of subsequent generations. From the stricken ear, the

The Siren Stage / 493

Eternal Promise

subject is led to itself. In its early acoustic or rhapsodic memory,
a few magical rhythms and sonic gestures accumulate and ring
ahead of the individual like leitmotifs from a hymnic heaven—
as yet unplayed and postponed, yet always on the point of finally
being performed. This is how I sound—and this is how I will be
once I am. 1 am the frothing up, the sound block, the liberated

494 / Bubbles

figure, I am the beautiful and bold passage, 1 am the leap to the
highest note; the world echoes with my sound when I show
myself as I have been promised to myself.

Does the pleading of Odysseus to be untied from the mast not
reveal his willingness to cooperate with the acoustic illusion of his
perfection? Struck intimately at his pole of arousal, he wants to
reach the place from which his song is being sung: is the cosmos
not created so that when I navigate around it I can, in a provi¬
dential place, hear myself perfectly?—It is no coincidence that
according to Greek traditions outside of the Odyssey, the Sirens
normally performed a lament for the dead. Their power is bor¬
rowed from the underword and its lords, Hades and Phorcys;
hence their voices are especially suitable for hymns of praise and
songs for the dead. Their foreknowledge concerns human destinies
and their unknown end. The ancient authors describe the Siren
voices as simultaneously honey-sweet and shrill—which perhaps
reminds us that the music of antiquity did not produce its oft-cited
magical effects through those elements known to post-Romantic
listeners as melodies and harmonies; instead, it forces itself upon
the listener through a form of ecstatic relentlessness—magically
over-articulated, penetratingly incisive and sustained to the point
of exhaustion. Ancient recitative places the ears of those gathered
in a state of emergency: a clarity that magnifies them, arouses them
and makes them defenseless. The muses speech is inscribed upon
the hearing in capital letters, as it were; its singers advance towards
the listeners like intoxicating verse-writing machines, and the
rhapsodists draw their circle around the tonicized listeners as living
drums. Without tolerating contradiction, the muse loudly and
clearly stakes its claim to move, which the dialectally mumbling
everyday subject is helpless to resist.

The S''en Stage / 495

Such a sonic phenomenon tears trivial time apart. Whoever
hears it must find a new balance between patience and arousal;
whoever dissolves in it will not be returning soon; and whoever
does finally return knows that from now on, life is a waiting for
the return of the verses. There are certain indications that for
modern ears, Homer s Siren music would be most similar to the
wailing of female mourners, organized in waves, that is said to
have survived in various cultural niches of the Eastern Mediter¬
ranean. (Did Nikos Kazantzakis not remind us of this in Zorba
the Greekt) Nonetheless, the Siren s listeners find their own
superhumanly sweet spot in their bitter recitals, just as the Sirens
hit the musical spot in their listeners whose arousal tells the
subject that its hour has come. Tied to the mast, Odysseus
throws his head back and begs for his release upon hearing the
rattling hexameters from the coast. “Remarkable Odysseus, halt
and hear...” —these words ring out across the water while his
deaf comrades row on. So these are the heavenly sounds that seek
out Odysseus in his ropes. The Sirens’ recitation permeates the
immobilized, intensely aroused listener like a eulogy from
beyond. To hear them is to recognize that one’s transformation
into song is complete, and one’s goal in life thus attained.
Odysseus is no exception to this song-metaphysical rule. Who¬
ever hears such songs of himself can assume that his own life is
now a topic of conversation at the tables of the gods. This, then,
is why the Siren rock becomes the cliff on which the prematurely
honored perish. There is no path leading back to everyday,
unsung existence from the song-grave in their own lifetime.

Odysseus is the first to escape his entry into song alive; he
stands at the beginning of a story that saw godly heroes end as
returning humans. Epic monsters would ultimately become wily

496/Bubbles

virtuosos—and names in the culture supplement. That is why
successful artists in more recent times had every reason to
acknowledge the crafty seafarer as their ancestor. For just as the
ancient hero took on an element of the swindler to survive his
transformation into song, modern artists, as soon as they experi¬
ence success, must creep out of the catalogues and art histories
like confidence tricksters preparing their next coup in secret.
Post-Homeric commentators also drew typological parallels
between Odysseus and Oedipus, and claimed that the Sirens
suffered a fate which clearly duplicates that of the Theban
sphinx: supposedly they leapt to their death out of grief over
Odysseus escape. The logic of this relationship seems transparent:
either Odysseus or the Sirens must die. The gentle wooliness of
modernity, however, dreams of everyone surviving, both artists
and reviewers (whose voices are still more often shrill than
sweet). As far as the ancient Sirens are concerned, it remains
peculiar that for an entire millennium—from Homer to his late
Hellenistic commentators—barely a word was written about the
material reason for the death of the men on the Sirens’ island. It
seems that all recipients darkly accept the connection between
being honored in song and having to die as a given. Their only
certainty is that the Sirens do not touch their victims in any way;
direct violence is not the singers’ business. Everything suggests
that their victims died of what was known in medieval times as
“wasting away”: the prematurely celebrated men perish of hunger
and thirst on the exterritorial island because it has nothing to
offer except rhapsodic seduction.

The notion that beauty knows no better fate than to be
buried in song anyway was still espoused—or rather espoused
again—around 1800 by Friedrich Schiller, as the national¬

ly Siren Stage /497

thanatologist of the bourgeoisie, as if it were a self-evident
higher truth:

Even to be a lament on the lips of the beloved is glorious,

For the lowly descend to Orcus unsung.

(“The Gods of Greece” 1788)

In such verses, we see the new bourgeois public sphere preparing
for the task of configuring mortality and the collective memory
in a contemporary manner within a burgeoning mass culture.
From 1800 on, cultural history became a song in which the emi¬
nent people wanted to find their place of idealization. The great
narratives describing the procession of artistic powers through
the different stylistic periods attract the highest ambitions, and
the bourgeois museums open their doors to anything that sup¬
posedly deserves to survive in the national collection. For the
others, communal cemetery administrations offer places of rest
under modestly inscribed tombstones. Those with the merciful
gift of faith can go on trusting that God, who has no storage
problems, can remember people better than the mundane media
can. In bourgeois times, one must always reckon with a degree
of advance condemnation to oblivion among all those who do
not stand out especially; only the world-historical individuals
who gained Hegels blessing through his concept and the art-
historical individuals who were elevated to the honor of altars in
the aesthetic religion escaped the general fate of disappearing
more or less unsung. Were it not the case that many are still
capable of positive involvement in the idealization of the great
other, then Andy Warhols dull witticism about fifteen-
minute fame for all would indeed describe the final horizon of

498 / Buotoes

a civilization in which, more than any currency, fame is devalued
through inflation.

The storyteller Jean Paul, that contemporary of Schiller expe¬
rienced in contemplative fervor, showed deeper insight into such
matters than the modern cynic when, in the novel Titan, he
wrote of his hero: “He read the eulogies of every great man with
as much delight as if they were meant for him.” 9 With this obser¬
vation he touches on the psychodynamic functional secret of
bourgeois societies, which could never survive without that “as if
they were meant for him.” From antiquity on, layered societies
are fame-distributing systems that synchronize their public
choruses with the intimate song expectations of individuals. The
space of fame arches over the peoples of history like a political
concert hall; here the individual life, once its transformation into
song is complete, is sung about by the masses. Odysseus tied to
the mast—today that would be the winner of an art prize sitting
through the eulogy with bowed head. Where it proves possible to
combine the Siren effect with the pantheon effect, the sound
wave of culture spreads discreedy and irresistibly among the sub¬
jects. Culture is the sum of all expected and spoken laudations.

Our analysis of the encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens
has expanded to include references to a theory of moved com¬
munication in large societies. What touches the individual
listener intimately and gives him the certainty of hearing his own
song is that specifically siren-like music which recites in the
open what arouses his own personal emotion. Homer’s Sirens
demonstrate the ability to access the others audio-vocal center
of feeling. But the art of making seafaring heroes melt is not the
only siren capacity. The skeletons of the seduced on the singers’

Tie Siren Stage /49Q

island only show one part of the effect of siren music—and, as
we will see, not the most significant. In truth, siren components
come into play whenever humans abandon themselves to moved
listening. In listening to the outer voice, as shown above, the
listeners most native, personal emotion wells up. So it is when
sirens—that is, sounds that move and demand unconditional
affirmation—become audible that things become serious for the
subjects sense of self. Hearing sirens means hearing “oneselP;
being called by them means moving towards them out of ones
“ownmost” desire. It is, incidentally, one of the typical self¬
revelations of the twentieth century—and one of its
characteristic cynicisms—that it referred to the wailing machines
on factory roofs, and in wartime also the alarm systems that
spread panic in cities being attacked from the air, as “sirens.” This
choice of name plays with the insight that sirens can trigger
archaic feelings among those who hear them, but it distorts this
with wicked irony by associating the siren with a forced alarm. The
most open form of listening was thus betrayed to terror, as if the
subject were only close to its truth when running to save itself. At
the same time, this renaming of the siren voice inappropriately
coarsens it, instrumentalizing it for the most brutal mass signals.
Sirens of this kind are the bells of the industrial and World War
age. They do not mark the sonosphere in which a joyful message
could spread. Their sound carries the consensus that everything
is hopeless and dangerous to all ears that can be reached.

When we speak here of a siren effect, on the other hand, this
refers to the intimate accessibility of individuals by sonic
messages that transmit a form of hypnosis via happiness, a
feeling of attaining the fulfilled moment That some listeners can be
reached and awakened by certain sounds would be unimaginable

5007 Buboles

if the sound itself were not met by a spontaneous urgent accom-
modation on the recipient $ part. As our reflections on the effects
of the Sirens’ recitation about Odysseus have shown, the irre¬
sistibility of song rests not on a sweetness particular to music,
but rather the alliance of the sound with the subjects most
discreet listening expectations. The ear comes with its own
selectivity, which waits persistently for the note that is unrecog¬
nizably its own; if that note does not sound, the intimate sonic
expectation stays in the background and the individual continues
its everyday business unmoved—literally—often without even
the possibility of sensing an other condition.

Recent psychoacoustic research, especially that of the French
otorhinolaryngologist and psycholinguist Alfred Tomatis and his
school, has attempted a suggestive explanation of the unusual
selectivity of the human ear that manifests itself in the siren
effect. Not only do these investigations into the human auditory
sense and its evolution show beyond doubt that unborn children
can already hear extremely well because of the ears early devel¬
opment—possibly from the embryonic state onwards, and
certainly in the second half of pregnancy; in addition, there are
impressive observations showing that this early listening ability
does not result in the fetus being passively at the mercy of the
mothers sonic inner life, or of the water-filtered voices and
noises of the outside world. Rather, the fetal ear already develops
the ability to find its bearings in its ever-present, invasive sonic
environment actively through independent, lively listening and
non-listening. As Tomatis untiringly emphasizes, the child’s stay
in the womb would be unbearable without the specific ability
not to listen and to mute large areas of noise, as the mothers
heartbeat and digestive sounds, heard in such close proximity,

The Sran Stage / 501

would be like the noise from a 24-hour building site or a lively
barroom conversation. If the child did not learn to avert its ears
at an early stage, it would be ravaged by permanent noise
torture. Numerous prenatal and perinatal myths remind us of
the risks of such primary cave noises and infernal rackets, for
example the Egyptian books of the underworld, which describe
crossing a desert of noise on the nocturnal voyage of the soul.
So when human children come into the world without having
been harrowed by intimate noise, it is because one of the first
impulses of their “I can” sense is to refrain from listening. This
contradicts the common myth of the fatefully unclosable ear.
Not listening and listening are original modes of pre-subjective
ability—in so far as ability is always connected to having an
alternative. With the help of this earliest sensory competence, a
primary distinction is introduced into the intrauterine night: it
establishes the difference between those sounds which concern
the listener, and are accommodated by him, and those which
remain indifferent or repulsive to him and are blocked out.
With this primal choice between turning towards and turning
away, the first difference of communicative behavior comes
into effect. The ear decides, within certain boundaries, how
welcome or unwelcome the various acoustic stimuli are. This
distinction precedes that between significant and insignificant
ones. It is a typical error of contemporary semiotics to view the
significant as something that is brought to light through selec¬
tion from the insignificant—as if the subject made an arbitrary
choice among an initial, indifferent assortment of noises of
which it has an over- w view” in order to obtain privately mean¬
ingful data. In reality, the field of the insignificant only comes
about when the ear turns away from the bothersome noise

502/Bubbles

presences; these are hence “posited 11 as uninformative or indif¬
ferent, and consequently excluded from the waking perception.
There is not first a field of indistinct noise and then a filtering
of information from this; rather, the indistinct noise arises as a
correlate of averting the ears from unwelcome sounds. At the
same time, however, our hearing approaches in a special way
those sounds it expects to grant particular enlivenment. In
listening closely, the ears carry out the primal act of the self;
all later instances of “I can,” “I want” or “I come” by necessity
follow on from this first manifestation of spontaneous liveli¬
ness. By listening closely, the incipient subject opens up and
moves towards a particular mood in which it can perceive
what is its own with wonderful clarity. Naturally such listening
can only apply to what is welcome. For the subject-to-be,
only those sounds which tell it that it is being welcomed are
themselves welcome.

One must seemingly assume that once pregnant women
notice their condition, they begin to speak for the intimate
witness in their body—and, to an extent, directly to it. If a
womans acknowledgement of her pregnancy is accompanied by
positive feelings, a fabric of delicate anticipations of togetherness
with the new life develops in her behavior, and the mothers begin
to act as if they were under discreet observation from now on.
They pull themselves together a little more than usual for the
witness inside them—they hear their own voices more clearly,
they feel they are being held responsible for their moods and
their successes in life, and they know that they themselves are not
merely an indifferent marginal condition for the successful
beginning of the new life. In particular, they feel—however
discreetly and implicitly—that they must be happy for the

The Siren Stage / 503

child’s sake. Act in such a way that your own mood could at
all times be a reasonable standard for a shared life: that is the
categorical imperative for the mother. The law of sharing the
good and bad fortune of ones partner in the intimate sphere
goes deeper than the moral law based on following the most
generalized norms. The duty to be happy is thus more moral
than any formal or material decree; it expresses the ethics of
creation itself. In the best case, the pregnant women become
exhilarated actresses, demonstrating existence to the eyeless
witness inside them like a sounding pantomime of happiness;
demonstration and seduction become one and the same. Even if
the mothers have reasons to be unhappy, they now have a
stronger to show greater happiness than they can feel. It is their
good fortune to be reminded very seriously that they must be
happy, and the only completely unsuitable mother would be one
who refused to want what she must do. The child’s state as the
object of the mothers expectations is conveyed by audio-vocal
means to the fetal ear, which, upon hearing the greeting sound,
unlocks itself completely and takes up the sonorous invitation.
By adopting a posture of listening, the happy and active ear
devotes itself to the words of welcome. In this sense, devotion is
the subject-forming act par excellence> for devoting oneself means
rousing oneself into the necessary state of alertness to open up to
the sound that concerns you.

This going-outside-oneself is the first gesture of the subject.
Above all, proto-subjectivity means feeling an accommodating
impulse and vibrating in the greeting. It can only be accommo¬
dating because it too has been accommodated. In straightening
up to listen, the pre-subject is persuaded of the advantage of
hearing. Up to this point, hearing means an active anticipation of

504 / Bubbles

friendly messages. It results in the birth of intentionality from
the spirit of listening for sounds of greeting and enlivenment.
Enjoyment as the first intention also begins in such listening.
What phenomenological research describes as intentionality or the
noetic striving towards concrete ideas, then, initially comes from
the fetal ears accommodation of sounds made by the adequately
good maternal voice. From the subjects earliest beginnings, the
ray of intentionality with which it “relates” itself to something
given has an echo character. Only because it is intended by the
mothers voice can it intend the enlivening voice itself. The audio¬
vocal pact creates two-way traffic in a ray; enlivening forces are
answered with a raising of the self to liveliness.

The theory of the siren effect thus leads into an investigation
of the first greeting. What initially seems no more than seduction
by something aspecifically very pleasant—the sonic magic of
sirens—transpires, in the study’s final perspective, as the repeti¬
tion of a constitutive greeting of the human being in its first
atmosphere. The human being is the more or less well-greeted
animal, and if its center of feeling is to be reactivated, one must
repeat the greeting that originally marks its initiation into the
world. The correct greeting or welcome is the deepest correspon¬
dence a subject can experience. Certainly the Sirens’ song from
Book 12 of the Odyssey can also be heard as a greeting hymn. The
heroic song, after all, only means—without the listener knowing
what has hit him—a welcome in the hereafter, for the fabulous
Sirens, as the ancients knew, belong to the other side. Their song
closes the file of a hero’s life with the remark “sung and com¬
pleted.” But while the Homeric singers dribble irresistible
invitations to completion into men’s ears, the good mothers’
voices invite the witnesses in their wombs to begin their own

The Ster Stage / 505

existences energetically. The peculiarity of the siren effect, then,
is that it creates a form of evangelistic intimacy: it creates good
news that can by its nature only be heard by one or two parties. 10

If we take this audio-vocal act of intimacy as the criterion,
then Christian evangelism also partakes in the siren effect in
several ways: the angelic greeting obliges the mother of the extra¬
ordinary child to look forward to the coming event at the highest
spiritual frequency. The mystical sermon commands the individual
to become pregnant with the divine spark and bear the Son within
itself. And in its vital functions, the Christian message generally
has the intention of raising up dejected life: evangelizo vobis
gaudium magnum . n What characterizes Christianity as a cultural
power is that time and again, it has managed to find a balance
between the individualizing and community-forming compo¬
nents in the effects of evangelistic communication—an
equilibrium between the muse and the siren, one might say.
While siren religiosity releases intimistic and mystical tendencies,
in precarious cases also sect magic and suicidal madness, the
muse s religio leads to communal integration and the coherence of
the peoples church, but at its dangerous extreme also mass
psychoses and belligerent chosenness offensives.

If one gives credence to the findings of the latest psychoa¬
coustic research, the fetus receives a fateful acoustic baptism in
the womb. This happens not so much through its factual
immersion in the intrauterine Jordan as through diving into the
exquisite sound that becomes audible when the mothers voice
speaks to the arriving life at her greeting frequencies. Baptizing
and greeting are identical; they place the indelible seal on the
welcomed being. With this mark begins the little-examined
history of the affective power of judgment: it is the ability to

506 / Bubbles

interpret overall circumstances in terms of their atmospheric
shadings. Because it is able to listen, the fetal ear can selectively
highlight the mothers affirming voice amid the constant
intrauterine noise. In this gesture the incipient subject experi¬
ences a euphoriant stimulation; according to Tomatis, it is the
overtones of the mothers soprano voice in particular that offer
an irresistible stimulus of joy. To make these claims plausible,
Tomatis interpreted the mothers entire body as a musical instru¬
ment—albeit one that does not serve to play a piece to the
listener, but rather brings about the original tuning of the ear.
The transmission of high and extremely high frequencies in the
soft, sound-swallowing bodily milieu is enabled, according to
Tomatis, by the unusual conductivity and resonant quality of
the skeleton; the mothers pelvis in particular is supposedly
capable of conveying the subtlest high frequency vibrations of
the mother s voice to the child s ear like the back of a cello. This
ear listens at the mothers pelvic floor and spine as a curious
visitor listens at a door behind which he suspects delightful
presents. What the little guest cannot yet know is that this
listening is its own reward, and that seeking to reach the other
side would be futile. The joy of anticipation already contains the
wealth of the enjoyable.

Clearly, current psychoacoustic research has given traditional
beliefs concerning the formative effects of pregnant womens
experiences on their unborn children new relevance, as well as
lending them physiological concreteness by pointing to the
specific transmission channel, namely auditory contact. Long-term
influence can only be exerted via the ear, admittedly, if the fetus
already has the sufficient neurological equipment to record and
retain acoustic engrams. Such neural “engravings” or imprintings

re Siren Stage / 607

would then—like acquired acoustic universal, so to speak—pre¬
structure everything yet to be heard; hence they act as effective
Platonic ideas of the hearing. Through prenatal auditions, the ear
was equipped with a wealth of heavenly acoustic prejudices
which, in its later work in the noisy pandemonium of reality,
facilitate orientation and especially selection. The wonderfully
biased ear would thus be capable of recognizing its primal
models at the greatest distance from the origin: so for listening
too, memory is everything. And just as Plato, in his discourse
on the effects of the beautiful face, speaks of torturous unrest
and hot flushes, as well as the lovers inclination to make sacri¬
fices to his beloved as if he were a god, 12 the new audio-
psycho-phonologists recount the startling effects of altered
maternal voices (simulated using the Electronic Ear) on their
patients. With barely any exceptions, and largely independently
of age, they experience sudden excursions into prenatal states and
begin radical reflection on their original talent for existing in
integrity, connectedness and welcomeness. With his Platonic
acoustics, Alfred Tomatis constructed a memory apparatus that
allows the soul to follow on from its states in the hyper-heavenly
place—more reliably and effectively, at first sight, than any philo¬
sophical anamnesis. In acoustic deep regressions, it grants the
ears of the hardened, the fixated and the unhappy an audience
with the original voice.

This shows that humans emerge without exception from a
vocal matriarchy: this is the psychological reason for the siren
effect. But while Homers Sirens produce sweet obituaries, the
mothers siren voice is anticipatory: it prophesies a sounding fate
for the child. In listening to it, the fetal hero embarks on his own
odyssey. 13 The irreplaceable voice utters an immediately self-

500 / Boboies

fulfilling prophecy: “you are welcome” or “you are not welcome.”
Thus the mothers vocal frequency becomes a Last Judgment
shifted back to the beginning of life. Mothers indeed greet whom
they please, and their will to greet is not assured under all cir¬
cumstances; they seldom refuse to offer any welcome at all,
however. In this sense, the Last Judgment at the beginning is
more merciful than that at the end—also because it knows a
second, therapeutic authority.

Showing great psychological and logical consistency, Saint
Augustine assessed the fallen souls chances of being called back
to God at the final verdict as very slim; his eschatology describes
a divine economy in which only the few are spared and return
home, while most are lost—bound into the great lump of perdi¬
tion (massa perditionis). That is where the dark majority remain
imprisoned, having failed to make adequate use of their second
chance, the gospel of the true religion. They are left with the
prospect of remaining in a personal God-forsaken hell as their
final, continuous state. Depth-psychological proto-acoustics
develops a somewhat more conciliatory doctrine by reformulating
the final judgment as an initial judgment passed on each indi¬
vidual life: the prejudice of the initial attunement. This judgment
can now be revised with psycho-phonological methods. In the
therapeutic revision process there is a good chance of an acoustic
rebirth—provided one can induce the mothers of troubled indi¬
viduals to record their voices with a belated message of love to the
child, which is then acoustically transformed in order to match
the intrauterine milieu. If accounts of the method s consequences
are not deceptive, it can have extraordinary effects. They not
infrequently cause almost magical regressions to lost beginnings
of lives. For countless people, such acoustic immersions appear to

The Sren Stage / 509

have opened up a second route to a good life. In substance, these
psycho-phonological manipulations constitute first steps towards
a theotechnic process. They reconstruct the second stage of
Adams creation—his pneumatic animation—using the means of
the most advanced audiophonic technology; they reenact the first
love in the virtual space.

In this manner, psychoacoustics establishes itself as the tech¬
nique of the first things. It defines the prototype of the radically
transformative, immersive and regenerative psychotherapy that
must replace the exhausted religion of salvation in our time.
Audiophonic psychotechnics negates the specific difference
between proto-musicality and proto-religiosity. Whoever
advances into these regions can no longer—as Max Weber so
pithily said of himself—be religiously unmusical. Here it is suf¬
ficient to hear the high sounds that welcome your life in order to
become both religious and musical, and both in the freest and
most flexible form. At the same time, audio-vocal technology dis¬
solves the boundary between soul and machine. As in some
forms of traditional music, intimate therapeutical emotion tran¬
spires as something that can, to a degree, be produced on
demand. The innermost ring of closeness techniques belongs not
to mesmerist treatment and hypnosis, but rather to psychoa¬
coustic, neuromusical and neurolinguistic procedures.

In our attempts to reveal the cause of individuals' accessibility to
the messages of their own kind, we have now touched on the
region of the most subtle resonance games. What we call the soul
in the language of immemorial traditions is, in its most sensitive
core area, a system of resonance that is worked out in the audio¬
vocal communion of the prenatal mother-child sphere. Here,

510/ Babbles

human bondage begins as acuteness or hardness of hearing . 14
The accessibility of humans to intimate appeals has its origin in
the synchronicity of greeting and listening; this movement
towards each other forms the most intimate soul bubble. When
the mother-to-be speaks inwards, she steps on the primal scene
for free communion with the intimate other. With a sufficiently
good greeting, the fetal ear can filter an adequate amount of high
enlivening frequencies from the maternal milieu: it stretches out
towards these sounds, and in its ability to hear well, it experiences
the pleasure of being in the ascendant through its ability to be at
all. Now the original unity of alertness, self-stimulation, inten-
tionality and anticipation is rehearsed almost automatically. In
this quaternity, the first blossoms of subjectivity open up. And
what the happy underwater tube does is not content to be asked
twice; if it is to believe the beloved voice, the latter must repeat
its message a hundred times—but the repetitions are as easy for
the adequately good mother as it is for the adequately addressed
fetal hearing to attune itself to the recurring vibration, listening
out anew each time as if it were the first. It notices the intention
and is exhilarated; here repetition is the crux of happiness. Long
before the glittering in the mothers voice returns in her eye, it
prepares the child for its reception in the world; only by listening
to the most intimate greeting can it adjust to the unsurpassable
advantage of being itself.

In its earliest exercises, then, intimacy is a transmission rela¬
tionship. Its model is not taken from the symmetrical alliance
between twins or like-minded parties, where each mirrors the
other, but from the irresolvably asymmetrical communion
between the maternal voice and the fetal ear. It is the uncondi¬
tional emergency of encounter, but it does not involve the two

Tn© .Siren Stage / S11

approaching each other from their respective spaces or situa¬
tions; rather, the mother is the situation of the child, and the
child's situation is nested within the maternal one. Acoustic
communion gives the primordial encounter its location in the
real. There is nothing between this voice and this ear that could
be considered a mirroring, and yet the two are inextricably related
in spheric union. Genuinely distinct, they are genuinely united.
The voice does not speak to itself, and the ear has not with¬
drawn to listening to its own sounds. Each is always already
outside-and-with-itselfi the greeting voice in its turn towards the
intimate co-listener, and the fetal ear in listening for the eupho¬
riant sound. This relationship has no trace of narcissism, no
unwarranted self-enjoyment arising from deceptive blind spots
in the individuals self-reference. What characterizes this unusual
relationship is an almost boundless surrender of the one to the
other, and an almost seamless interlocking of the two sources of
feeling. It is as if the voice and the ear had dissolved in a shared
sonorous plasma—the voice entirely geared towards beckoning,
greeting and affectionate encasement, and the ear mobilized to
go towards it and be revived by melting into its sound.

Upon reflection, these observations cannot really contain any¬
thing new, as they describe fundamental conditions that have
always had to be known and cared for via some idea or other. The
novelty in these matters can only ever lie in the electric, perhaps
demonic explicitness of their presentation. If the unfolding of the
theory is to be effective, one must hear the rustling of the wrap¬
ping paper in which something almost familiar and almost
forgotten is handed to the owner once again like something new.
This is the typical sound accompanying the gifts phenomenology

5127 Bubbles

has to offer, for giving phenomenologically means giving nothing
new in an entirely new way. Obviously midwifes, mothers and
great mothers have always looked after this area of knowledge cor¬
rect intuitions, and it is only through the victorious individualistic
abstractions of the last centuries that the sphere of fetal commu¬
nions has been pushed ever further away from the feelings and the
cognizance of individuals. In Chapter 3 above, which deals with
the social history of recent practices of closeness, in particular
mesmerism and animal magnetism, we outlined a striking wave of
recent intimacy techniques whose offshoots are still potent to this
day, and there was an opportunity to show how the most prescient
authors of this movement interpreted the peculiarity of magnetic
rapport as a direct reproduction and reactivation of the fetal posi¬
tion. It was above all Friedrich Hufeland and Hegel who were
most explicit in this. They not only conceived of the fetus as a
plant growing up inside an animal, striving towards an animality
and spirituality of its own; they also understood the incipient sub¬
ject as a form of malleable psychoplasma in which intense ideas
harbored by the mother are capable of leaving their imprint.

Nonetheless, the classic articulation of the modern theory of
the mothers psychoplastic effects on the fetus is over a century
older than psychomagnetism and its consideration in German
Idealism; it was already made in Nicola Malebranches Recherche
de la veriti from 1674. In his uncommonly radical theory of
imagination, the author develops a resolutely medial theory of
motherhood characterized by the possibility of long-distance
viewing and feeling. The Oratorian monk and psychologist
Malebranche conceived of wombs as projectors through which
good or bad images—almost like primal prejudices about the
outside world—are cast onto the soft matrix of the child’s soul.

The Siren Stage / 513

Thus, children see what their mothers see [...J. For basically
the body of the child is but a part of the mothers body, the
blood and spirits are common to both [...]. 15

About seven or eight years ago, I saw at the Incurables a
young man who was born mad, and whose body was broken
in the same places in which those of criminals are broken. He
had remained nearly twenty years in this state. Many persons
saw him, and the late queen mother, upon visiting this hospi¬
tal, was curious to see and even to touch the arms and legs of
this young man where they were broken.

According to the principles just established, the cause of
this disastrous accident was that his mother, having known
that a criminal was to be broken, went to see the execution.
All the blows given to this miserable creature forcefully struck
the imagination of this mother and, by a sort of counterblow,
the tender and delicate brain of her child. The fibers of this
womans brain were extremely shaken and perhaps broken in
some places by the violent flow of the spirits produced at the
sight of such a terrible occurrence, but they retained sufficient
consistency to prevent their complete destruction. On the
other hand, the child’s brain fibers, being unable to resist the
torrent of these spirits, were entirely dissipated, and the
destruction was great enough to make him lose his mind for¬
ever. That is the reason why he came into the world deprived
of sense. Here is why he was broken at the same parts of his
body as the criminal his mother had seen put to death.

At the sight of this execution, so capable of frightening a
woman, the violent flow of the mothers animal spirits passed
very forcefully from her brain to all the parts of her body cor¬
responding to those of the criminal, and the same thing

514/Butt*to3

happened in the child. But* because the mothers bones were
capable of resisting the violence of these spirits, they were not
wounded by them. [...] But this rapid flow of the spirits was
capable of sweeping away the soft and tender parts of the
child’s bones. [...]

It has not been more than a year since a woman, having
attended too carefully to the portrait of Saint Pius on the feast
of his canonization, gave birth to a child who looked exactly
like the representation of the saint. [...] his arms were crossed
upon his chest, with his eyes turned toward the heavens [...].

He had a kind of inverted miter on his shoulders, with many
round marks in the places where miters are covered with
gems. [...] This is something that all Paris has been able to see
as well as me, because the body was preserved for a considerable
time in alcohol. 16

These excerpts from Malebranche’s deliberations make it clear
how much reflections on prenatal phenomena were biased
towards visual models already in the early Modern Age. The
bizarre idea that images of horror from the mothers soul
should be traced onto the child $ body proves that the intimate
communion between mother and child was thought of primarily
graphically or eidetically. Nature as the creator is here imagined
as a draftswoman who, via the mediation of active life spirits, can
inscribe the outlines of pathological outside-world objects and
scenes through the mothers and into the fetal plasma.

The idea that this visual imagination is accompanied by a
constitutive sonic imagination which plays an even more important
part, indeed the decisive one, in the incorporation of the child
into the world was, to our knowledge, first developed seriously by

T r &Sjten Stage / 515

516 / Sutftlss

Anita Gratzer, Pulcherrima , from Human Time Anatomy. Now housed in the Fed¬
eral Museum of Pathology and Anatomy, Vienna

psychologists and otologists of the twentieth century; and it is no
coincidence that they usually did so in contradistinction to the
dogmas of the Zurich and Vienna schools of psychoanalysis,
whose imago-oriented view and its continuation in the theory of
inner objects and the doctrine of archetypes paid tribute uncritically

u> the dominant visual prejudices of their milieu. Those who
assert the primacy of the sonic imagination can refer to impressive
evolutionary evidence that give the ear a key role in the develop¬
ment of higher forms of organization for life in general. Among
songbirds one already finds traces of auditory formability in ovo:
experiments have shown that the chick in the egg enjoys a species-
specific music education through the mothers singing. Young
birds incubated by mute mothers become vocally insecure or
songless, while those brooded over by singing mothers of a differ¬
ent species show the tendency to adopt the melodies of that
species. Anyone seeking to naturalize Plato and uncover evidence
of prenatal information on the “soul” would find the most sug¬
gestive corroboration in such observations. The listening
conditions among mammals support these conclusions even
more. Here the bond between the fetal ear and the mothers voice
develops further, to the point of unambiguous individualization:
according to evolutionary biologists, newborn piglets or kids are
immediately capable of recognizing their mothers voice with
absolute certainty among thousands of similar ones—an achieve¬
ment of early shaping that can only be explained by a form of
prenatal “tuning.” Among humans, the process of subtle symbiotic
attunements in the audio-vocal resonant space is even more highly
differentiated, encompassing emotional keys, 17 recitative-like
accents, types of sonorous milieu and, above all, individual fre¬
quencies of welcome. As it attunes itself to the sounding space
that will later bear the name “mother,” the hearing of the human
fetus develops the decisive rudiments of motoric-musical subjec¬
tivity. People come into the world through chamber music; only
there can they learn that listening to the other voice is the pre¬
condition for having anything to play oneself. One can therefore

The Siren Stage/517

Wolfgang Rihm, bn Innersten , Third String Quartet. Text: “In this movement,
there is not a single crescendo or decrescendo. The dynamics indicated always apply
to the full note value or note group. There should be no transitions between
dynamic levels, even when, for example, the harmonic context seems to demand it
in keeping with traditional performance practice.

5187 Gobbles

„U Jilt iv^v^vua *^v r <h N/ erf* ki^WO^
i Aolttv- >2 jo|-> c^v^

iM i^sic-^'f' krr> Z,&,
Tw^ pj* fcli-*w ^fWtU »wtr

say that the human beings time in the world is defined, more
than with any other living creature, by the necessity of staying
within a psychoacoustic—or, more generally speaking, in a
semiospheric—continuum and developing there.

As we have stated and shown several times in the course of
our reflections, humans are sphere-dwellers from the start, and in
this specific sense they are creatures predisposed towards a divi¬
sion of the inner world. Now we are in a position to offer a closer

Two Sren S:age / 519

characterization of the central fabric of this constitutive inferiority,
namely its contribution to producing an intimizing sound phe¬
nomenon. It is the constitutive listening community that
encloses humans in the immaterial rings of mutual accessibility.
The ear is the organ that connects the intimate and the public.
Whatever might present itself as social life, it initially comes
about only in the specific width of an acoustic bell over the
group—a bell whose sonorous presences, especially in European
cultures, are capable of textualization. Only in the social
sonosphere can chamber music turn into choral politics; only
here, in the stream of speech, is the mother-child space connected
to the stages of adult myths and the arena of political quarrels
over right and wrong. In a synergetic area of natural-historical
and symbol-historical influences, human ears rose to become
the leading agencies of ethnic associations. It is only through
the arousing extreme development of the hearing that human
existence within a sonospheric hothouse became possible. Even
if natural languages had developed into phonetic systems
without any claims to reference or meaning—if there were only
choirs, no working groups—humans would be exactly the same
in all fundamental respects as they are now (minus the workers'
autisms). In the wall-less house of sounds, humans became the
animals that come together by listening. 18 Whatever else they
might be, they are sonospheric communards.

520 / Bubbles

Excursus 8

Illiterate Truths

A Note on Oral Fundamentalism

There is a distinctive and not entirely powerless tradition in
European intellectual history that truth is something that
cannot be articulated through speech, let alone writing, but
only through singing—and most of all through eating. This
concept of truth is concerned not with the representation or
imagining of a matter in a different medium, but rather the
absorption or integration of one matter into a different matter.
Clearly there is a collision here between two radically different
models of truth-enabling adequation: while the generally noted
and respected representational truth involves an alignment of
intellect and thing or statement and fact, the comparatively
unacknowledged absorption-based truth aims for an equiva¬
lence of content and container or devourer and devoured.
Semioticians and theologians have worn us down often enough
with the corresponding examples: the statement “It is raining
now” is, as we have heard, true if and only if there is genuinely
reason to believe that it is raining now. My listening to music,
on the other hand, is only true listening if I myself become
music-shaped in the presence of the piece, and my eating of the
communion wafer only assists my salvation if I myself become

521

Christ-shaped by swallowing the offering. There is clearly some¬
thing special about the mode of adequation in the last two
examples. It is obvious that we are not simply dealing with
different concepts of truth and equivalence, but that entirely
incomparable dimensions of appropriateness and the ability to
be precise also come into play here. While one can usually say
sufficiently precisely with representational truths when the pre¬
conditions for their validity are fulfilled, one can never be quite
sure of this in the case of absorption-based truths. The corre¬
spondences arising from absorptions are constitutively vague;
this vagueness should not be viewed as a deficiency, however,
but rather as defining the particular mode of being and chance
of this truth field. Perhaps I can go unchallenged in stating that
this sleeve, if and because it fits, is a true counterpart of this arm.
I would surely encounter objections, however, if I specified
where the listener is when he immerses himself in the event
space of a present piece of music, or where Christ is when the
wafer disappears down the throat of the communicant.

Absorbing something into oneself and letting oneself be
absorbed in something: with these two gestures, humans secure
for themselves what one could call their participatory compe¬
tence. Through consumption they absorb food and drink, and
by taking place in a round of consumers they make their
absorption into a table fellowship visible. The non-insane, non-
perverted human possesses the power of judgment not least
because of the ability to discern where he participates as an
absorber and where as an absorbed. If he has not lost all reason,
that is to say his sense of correspondence, he will always know
with sufficient accuracy when he is the vessel and when its con¬
tent, when he uses something up and when he himself is used

522 / Bjtfbses

up. One could say that all oral truth is based on the differen¬
tiation of tables. In order to be adequately complete human
beings, we must learn at which tables we are the eaters and at
which we become the eaten. The tables at which we eat are
called dining tables; those at which we are eaten are called
altars. But are we, as human beings, directly altar-capable? Is it
possible and permissible to describe humans in terms of their
suitability to be put on the table? It is the axiom of all culture
that communicating people come to the table rather than being
put on it. The man put on the table legitimately would—
speaking within the Christian horizon—would no longer be a
man but the God-man, who wants to make himself present in
us through oral communion and integrate us into his imaginary
body; and the table set for this would precisely no longer be the
profane dining table, but rather the altar—that is, the table of
the Lord, where such food is permitted as we can eat in the
awareness that it will eat us or spit us out later on. The other
table belongs only to God, who gives and takes without restric¬
tions. The edible God is the founder of the table fellowship as
the true commune whose members have agreed on exophagia.
Only by refraining from endophagous relationships can humans
recognize one another as their own kind. In the true community,
all are ultimately equal only before the law not to consider
viewing one another as food. And if we do eat meat, it must at
all costs be foreign meat—firstly that of permitted animals,
which feed us as a profane group, and secondly that of the true
God, who unites us as a holy group.

The field of absorption-based truths is of fundamental
significance for the construction of human reason because it is
precisely there that the essential distinction between true and

Truths / 523

false comes into effect. As in the field of representational truths,
it is the case here too—and above all here—that the false ulti¬
mately brings death; that which enables and extends life, on the
other hand, can be considered the true. Whoever takes poison
will die, as will anyone who lands inside the wrong whale. That
is why, even in a culture as extremely geared towards representa¬
tional truth as our modern one, it is vital that the awareness of
absorptive and participatory relationships and their respective
degrees of truth and error does not fall into neglect. There is
reason to note that the critique of absorption-based relationships
is in a worse state than ever before; philosophy in particular,
which was traditionally responsible for this, has, if one examines
the last two centuries, descended into a cluelessness that is
culture-historically unprecedented; had this space not been
filled by psychological and myth-critical disciplines in the
course of the twentieth century, the area of responsibility of a
philosophical critique of participatory reason would be in
even more desolate condition than it currently is. The formula
“participatory reason” implies the thesis that there are appropriate
and inappropriate participations whose difference is akin to that
between true and false. Even the appropriate and inappropriate
forms of participation should not be imagined only as voluntary
memberships in public projects, however, but also as an inclusion
in consumptive communions—under the premise that even
among non-cannibals, there are necessary, discreet and welcome
endophagous relationships.

The positive paradigms for this can naturally be found in the
world of early mother-child relationships: if one could charac¬
terize normal pregnancy as the mothers devotion to her own
consumption by the foreign body inside it, the breastfeeding

524 / Bubbles

period would be the active accommodation by the female body
of its cannibalistic use by the infant. If one focuses on the child's
perspective, it transpires that the incipient subject claims the
unconditional right to settle as an absolute consumer in the
milieu it finds—a milieu that has obviously existed since
primeval times and seemingly knows no other purpose than to
fulfill the needs of the intruder at all costs. The ontological irony
of the maternal milieu is that no fetus, no infant, no young
child—in short, no human being—can know in advance that
the world only has the character of a magically available milieu
shows how she is accessible as an inhabitable, cannibalizable,
retrievable mother. And there is nothing to suggest that she
might one day become inaccessible, as long as the sufficiently
good, sufficiently edible mother takes the side of the cannibals
longing for her. She signals to the child that it is completely
right to desire nourishment initially only from her and through
her. Thus the original oral truth function, the elemental consis¬
tency of the child’s consumptive participation in the mother, is
reinforced by the consumed party. The mother-eater is always
right, and is right to be right: its drive to absorb is based on an
immemorial biological truth relationship, in the sense that its
claim to nourishment through the mother generally encounters
the accommodation of the mother’s breasts; where there is an
unmistakable appetite, there is also the unmistakable dose. One
could speak here of an a priori synthesis in the somatic. In the
maternal milieu, a child that is not overly frustrated acquires the
proto-religious faith that an eternally valid pragmatic equation
is in force between calling and drinking. This conviction forms
the core of the child’s belief that it can perform magic—a
belief without which the opposite of magic, namely work,

! tsrate Truths / 525

must ultimately remain pointless; for one can only work success¬
fully as long as one still believes that effort calls for happiness,
and that it will accordingly come once the work is done.
Growing up consists in accepting that the magic-enabling equa¬
tion of call and success has the tendency to fade, and ultimately
disappear almost entirely. But how, if those who seek no longer
find? If what is called no longer comes? The first magic gradually
dissolves into struggle and work, until the point is reached where
the subject—on the threshold of bitterness—admits that whoever
does not work should not eat, and that whoever cannot refrain
may not indulge. The word “work” sums up a state of the world
in which it is no longer enough simply to call or use magical
formulas in order to find satisfaction. Where work has entered
the horizon, the experience that calling helps can only be defended
by religious or aesthetic means. And the belief that the happiness
one has called will come after an appropriate time is only sus¬
tained by the fact that the question of who should ultimately be
considered the giver of our daily bread can be left open. Religion
survives as a memory of the days when calling still helped.

As archaic as it may be, consumptive participation in the
maternal milieu through ones own infans voice is not the earliest
form of absorption magic. Before the subject could experience
the necessity of calling in order to eat, it was granted an even
deeper form of participation that, as a fetal, sanguine, endo-
acoustic communion, offered the absolute maximum of
absorbed life. That is where those who want neither to work nor
to call strive to return in order to find that archaic homeostasis
once more. Before the infans , the non-speaker, comes the incla-
mansy the non-caller. It is characteristic of modern mass culture
that it has learned how to bypass the tables and altars of high

526/ Bubbles

culture and offer new, direct ways of fulfilling the desire for
homeostatic communion. This is the psychodynamic purpose of
pop music and all its derivatives: for its consumers, it stages the
possibility of diving into a body of rhythmic noise in which
critical ego functions become temporarily dispensable. Anyone
who witnesses the behavioral gestures at discotheques and sound
parades as an impartial observer must conclude that the current
mass music audience strives for an enthusiastic self-sacrifice by
plunging—voluntarily and at its own risk—into the sound
crater. It clearly longs to be drawn inwards by the acoustic
juggernaut and transformed inside its innards into a rhythmi-
cized, oxygen-deprived, pre-subjective something. Pop music
has overtaken religious communions—Christian ones—on the
archaic wing by outdoing the chances of absorption found at
altars with the offer to join psychoacoustic abdominal cavities
and follow passing audio gods. 19 This was especially evident at
the Berlin Love Parades of the 1990s and their replicas in
European cities, which, in cultural-anthropological terms, are
interesting as particularly explicit displays of “true” absorption
relationships. According to their immanent concept, they could
just as easily be called “Truth Parades,” as their aim is to absorb
large numbers of people, all of whom value the attributes of
their individuality, into happy, symbiotic, reversible and thus
“true” sonospheres. These communions with the audio gods or
the rhythmic juggernauts are based on the same truth model as
post-Freudian psychoanalysis—with the difference that the
latter recommends that its clients develop a strict individual
rhetoric of mourning for the lost primal object, while integristic
music therapy in the streets relies on drug-assisted group eupho¬
rias that may advance flirtation with absorption into a spheric

li terate Truths / 527

primal body in the short term, but yield little profit for the
participants’ medial competence in the sobering periods that
follow. But the Love Parades, as well as countless other forms in
which collective ecstasy is enacted, do reveal how modernity
works on making the basic relationship among human ensem¬
bles, namely psychoacoustic integrism, producible in ever more
direct, unabashed and religion-free ways.

In this sense, the couch and the ecstasy of the disco belong
together like the concave and convex sides of a single truth lens.
They have the same theotechnic connection, in so far as they
arrange relationships to a remote, but not entirely extinguished
primal object, a sonorous divine thing-in-itself. Without this
connection to the intimate absolute, human expressive speech
would be divorced from any transcendent cause or referent and
fall prey to self-referentially closed linguistic play. According to
the schema of psychoanalysis and the love/truth parade, however,
the inexpressible truth is only revealed to a pre-linguistic subject.
Whether this subject paradoxically refuses to have learned to
read, write and speak, like mystics and ecstatics, or the
analysands plunge into reading, writing and singing all the more
vigorously in order to say the unsayable, this is merely a choice
of strategy against the background of the same model. Which is
why the ideal patient makes an effort to reach for the great lost
using the refined methods of speech and writing, while the ideal
cult participant devotes himself to the revelation of noise in the
real presence of the loudspeaker truck. That no psychoanalytical
treatment would ultimately be possible without an orientation of
the desiring subject around a psychological thing-in-itself—one
could also say around an illiterate transcendence—is demon¬
strated by Julia Kristeva in a lucid series of reflections:

528 / Bubclas

In the radius of a sound juggernaut: the 1998 Berlin Love Parade

The obsession with the primal object, the object to be con¬
veyed, assumes a certain appropriateness (imperfect, to be
sure) to be considered possible between the sign and not the
referent but the nonverbal experience of the referent in the
interaction with the other. I am able to name truly. The Being
that extends beyond me—including the being of affect—may
decide that its expression is suitable or nearly suitable. The
wager of conveyability is also a wager that the primal object
can be mastered [...]. Metaphysics, and its obsession with

I'lilsrar© Truths / 529

conveyability, is a discourse of the pain that is stated and
relieved on account of that very statement. It is possible to be
unaware of, to deny the orial Thing, it is possible to be
unaware of pain to the benefit of signs that are written out or
playful, without innerness and without truth. The advantage
of those civilizations that operate on the basis of such a model
is that they are able to mark the immersion of the subject
within the cosmos, its mystical immanence with the world.
But, as a Chinese friend recognized, such a culture is without
means for facing the onset of pain. Is that lack an advantage
or a weakness?

Westerners, on the other hand, are convinced they can
convey the mother [...], but in order to [...] betray her, trans¬
pose her, be free of her. Such melancholy persons triumph over
the sadness at being separated from the loved object through an
unbelievable effort to master signs in order to have them corre¬
spond to primal, unnameable, traumatic experiences.

Even more so and finally the belief in conveyability
(“mother is nameable, God is unnameable”) leads to a strongly
individualized discourse, avoiding stereotypes and cliches, as
well as to the profusion of personal styles. But in that very
practice we end up with the perfect betrayal of the unique
and in-itself Thing (the Res divind)\ if all the fashions of
naming it are allowable, does not the Thing postulated in
itself become dissolved in the thousand and one ways of
naming it? The posited conveyability ends up with a multi¬
plicity of possible conveyances. The Western subjet, as
potential melancholy being, having become a relentless
conveyor, ends up a confirmed gambler or potential atheist.
The initial belief in conveyance becomes changed into a

530 / Bubbles

belief in stylistic performance for which the nearside of the
text, its other, primal as it may be, is less important than the
success of the text itself . 20

Even if all problems of representation and self-reference were to
be solved, the questions of absorption, participation and imma¬
nence would not even have been touched on.

Illiterate Truths / 531

Excursus 9

Where Lacan Starts to Go Wrong

The immediately problematic imago-oriented perspective of
psychoanalytical relationship theories was taken to its extreme by
Jacques Lacan in his legendary theorem of the “mirror stage as
formative of the ego function” 21 published in 1949. Lacan
assumes an early childhood sensibility that is always already
cursed with the impossibility of tolerating itself. For Lacan, every
infant is shattered by incurable states of inner destruction. Psy¬
chosis is its truth and reality, inescapable and present from the
start. It plunges into the world, powerless and betrayed, as the
body that has already been cut to pieces and can scarcely hold
its fragments together. The truth would be that this dismember¬
ment would precede totality, and that a primal psychosis would
have the first say everywhere. For a being so thoroughly disso¬
ciated and stewing in its own forlornness, the sight of its own
clearly defined image over there in the mirror—if we go along
with the analyst’s suggestions for a moment—would surely be
very edifying, as the subject could finally, in the imaginary
Yonder, see itself for the first time as a complete form without
ruptures or blemishes. The self-image in the mirror would come
into play here as the liberator from an unbearable sense of self.

633

Only the image over there in the mirror space would prove to
me, against my evident sense of self, that I am not a monster but
a shapely child within the beautiful boundaries of its organic
form. Recognizing oneself in the mirror with the thought “that’s
me” would then mean: smiling at the picture that has suddenly
flashed up, taking its integrity as a message of salvation and
ascending with the joy of liberation to an imaginary heaven of
the complete image in which it would never again have to make
concede to the previous real and true disunity. Finally the infans
could leave behind its humiliating dismemberment and raging
impotence; it would suddenly be able to float out through the
mirror glass, newly invulnerable, into the visual space and enter
the kingdom of a delusional integrity like a transfigured hero—
radiantly saved from the wretched primary condition to which it
believes it will now never have to return, assuming that the
dream shield of the incorruptible image ego can eliminate all
later disturbances. Then ego development would always
inevitably begin with a redemptive self-misjudgment: the imagi¬
nary apparition out there—my image as an intact, whole, saving
one—would take me out of the imageless hell of my sensed early
life, if I now accepted it radically at my side, and make the won¬
derfully deceptive promise that I would always be able to live
towards this image, as if under the protection of an illusion. My
illusory image of myself out there in visibility—in the imaginary
or the transfigured visual realm—would, through its well-formed
wholeness, be a gospel written purely for me; a promise that
anticipates me and consolidates me. As soon as I had taken it up
into myself, it would lie at the bottom of my self as the good
news of my resurrection from early destruction. My image, my
primal delusion, my guardian angel, my delirium.

534 / Bubbles

It can easily be shown that this most famous early theorem
from the body of Lacanian doctrines is as brilliant as it is ill-
conceived—established on the basis of willful and pathos-laden
misinterpretations of the early dyadic communication between
the child and its augmenter-companion, which, aside from its
prenatal supplementation media is usually the mother. For the
child’s own mirror image cannot as such add anything to the
child’s “self’’-findings that has not long since been set up within
it at the level of vocal, tactile, interfacial and emotional games
of resonance and their inner sediments. Before each encounter
with its own mirror image, a non-neglected infans “knows” very
well and very precisely what it means to be an unscathed life
inside a carrying-containing dual. In a sufficiently well-formed
biune mental structure, pictorial self-perception occurs in the
child—which occasionally notes its reflection in a glass, metallic
or watery medium—as an exhilarating, curiosity-inducing
additional layer of perception on top of an already dense,
encouraging web of resonance experiences; by no means does the
image in the mirror appear as the first and all-surpassing infor¬
mation about its own ability to be whole; at most, it makes an
initial reference to its own appearance as a coherent body
among coherent bodies in the real visual space, but this inte¬
gral being-an-image-body means almost nothing alongside the
pre-imaginary, non-eidetic certainties of sensual-emotional dual
integrity. A child that grows up in a sufficiently good continuum
has long since been adequately informed through other sources
of the reasons for its containedness in a fulfillment form. Its
interest in coherence is more or less satisfied long before receiving
the mirror-eidetic information. The sight of its mirror image
does not acquaint it with any radically new possibility of happiness

Where Lscar Starts to Go Wrong / 535:

and being that is based exclusively in the visual-imaginary realm.
Apart from that, one must take into account that—as already
observed 22 —most European households did not possess mirrors
until the nineteenth century, which means that the simplest
culture-historical consideration already makes Lacans theorem,
which behaves like some transhistorically valid anthropological
dogma, seem unfounded.

If, admittedly, the resonance game between the child and its
augmenting other is burdened with instances of ambivalence,
neglect and sadism, the child will naturally develop a tendency to
cling to the thin moments of positive augmentative experience—
whether precarious kindnesses by its reference persons,
autoerotic dreams of withdrawal, or identifications with the
invulnerable heroes of fairy tales and myths. Whether the early
sight of their own mirror images genuinely helps psychotic
children on the threshold between the baby and toddler phases
to achieve imaginary resurrections through visually assisted
phantasms of integrity has not been empirically established at all.
At any rate, the exceptional situation elevated to the norm by
Lacan, in which the incipient subject tumbles out of itself and
into the picture in order to escape the imbalance it senses in its
own fragmented skin and become something deceptively whole
in the world of images, only constitutes—should it ever acquire
casuistic reality—a pathological extreme. It could only have a
place in life within impoverished family structures, and in
milieus with a tendency towards chronic neglect of infants. For
every ego formation that took place in this way via a flight to the
visual illusion of intactness, one could indeed predict that para¬
noid instability that Lacan, based on his self-analysis, wrongly
sought to present as a general characteristic of the psyche in the

538/BjDbtes

cultures of all periods. If it were genuinely the case that one could
always find a self-blinding imaginary element of this type at the
bottom of a self, it would at least explain why the subject in a
Lacanian universe only finds wellbeing, or at least order, in the
symbolic. Only submission to the symbolic law can save the
subject from a constitutive psychosis. But what is that if not the
continuation of Catholicism by ostensibly psychoanalytical
means? Certainly no one will suspect injuries from all sides with
such feverish prescience as a subject that has made its ability to
be whole dependent on the protection of fantastically extrava¬
gant glossy images of its own ego; but anyone who claimed that
basal ego formations in the imaginary are, according to this
mode, the universal rule would be underpinning the first extrav¬
agance with a second. This would mean placing psychology itself
in the service of psychosis. Lacan surrendered early on to a dog¬
matic belief in primal psychosis whose motifs stemmed not from
psychoanalytical interests but from crypto-Catholic, surrealistic
and para-philosophical ones. In its tendency and tone, Lacans
remarkable theorem of the mirror stage is a parody of the Gnos¬
tic doctrine of liberation through self-knowledge; using a
problematic model, he replaces original sin with original decep¬
tion, yet without ever making it clear whether this deception
should be conserved or overcome. In all cases, it is supposedly
their initial self-misjudgment that provided the subjects with
such indispensable, yet also disastrous illusions of themselves—
Lacan occasionally spoke of the “orthopedic” function of the
primary illusion. So who could survive mentally intact without
the spine of self-deception—and who is supposed to have an
interest in breaking that of the subject? At the same time, how¬
ever, the deception is meant to be just that: an illusion which

Where Lacan Starts to Go Wrong / 537

must be seen through, in so far as it holds temptations that
endanger the self. To know or not to know oneself—that is the
question. So much the worse for those who were never met by
the credible image of their own ability to be whole, coming from
a supposedly imaginary realm—let alone from a real love.

538/ Bubbles

CHAPTER 8

Closer to Me Than I Am Myself

A Theological Preparation for the
Theory of the Shared Inside

We must set forth the ontological Constitution of inhood
[Inheit] itself. [_]

What is meant by “Being-in”? [...] Being-in [...] is a state
of Daseins Being [...].

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time\ p. 79

“What is this ‘in’?” Agathe asked emphatically. Ulrich shrugged
his shoulders and then gave a few indications. [...]

“Perhaps the psychoanalytic legend that the human soul
strives to get back to the tender protection of the intrauterine con¬
dition before birth is a misunderstanding of the ‘in,’ perhaps not.
Perhaps ‘in' is the presumed descent of all life from God. But
perhaps the explanation is also simply to be found in psychology;
for every affect bears widiin it the claim of totality to rule alone
and, as it were, form the 'in in which everything else is immersed.”
— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities , p. 1497

So where are we when we are in a small inside? In what way can
a world, despite its opening towards the immeasurable, be an

539

intimately divided round world? Where are those who come into
the world when they are in bipolar intimate spheres or bubbles?
On our path through some of the folds and turns in the human¬
forming microcosms of interlocked interiority, seven layers of an
answer to this question have so far taken shape.

We are in a microsphere whenever we are

—firstly in the intercordial space

— secondly in the interfacial sphere

— thirdly in the field of “magical” binding forces and hyp¬
notic effects of closeness

—fourthly in immanence, that is to say in the interior of the
absolute mother and its postnatal metaphorizations

— fifthly in the co-dyad, or the placental doubling and its
successors

— sixthly in the care of the irremovable companion and its
metamorphoses

— seventhly in the resonant space of the welcoming maternal
voice and its messianic- evangelistic-artistic duplications.

It will be noted that this list is missing the inter-genital relation¬
ship and the inter-manual connection, as if to suggest that coitus
and handshakes are excluded from the intimate-spheric field. In
truth, the two gestures are fairly peripheral from the perspective
of microspheric analysis, even if they—especially the sexual
one—represent intimate relationships that are prototypical for
everyday consciousness. Sexuality in particular, even though it
occasionally releases suggestive intimate experiences, has no inti¬
mate light of its own, any more than the encounter between
warriors on the inside of a Ring creates intimate-spherically
relevant contacts in and of itself. If de facto intimacy comes into

540 / Bubbles

play here, it is only through the transference of closeness rela¬
tionships from real intimate scenes of the kind listed above to
genital or athletic duels and duals. Such transferences distinguish
human sexuality from that among animals. While animals can
content themselves with slotting their reproductive organs
together for intercourse, that same quandary motivates humans
to produce an increase in intimacy. This can only be drawn from
the reservoir of transferable closeness memories from else¬
where—extending to the Tristan embrace, in which the lovers
both enact their return into the original womb in the shape of
the other. Nothing shows more clearly that humans are con¬
demned to intimate surrealism than the fact that most of the
time, even their genital interactions have to be arranged on a
virtual inner-world stage.

At first glance, the variants of intimacy relationships treated here
only share a single formal quality: they never separate the subject
from its environment, nor do they place it in confrontation with
something that is present in concrete form or faces it as a state of
affairs; rather, they integrate it into an encompassing situation
and take it up into a space of relationships with two or more
locations, where the ego side only represents one pole. Hence the
common thread in this septernity would, if the term were per¬
mitted and current, be its “structuring” through inhood\ This
neologism, which surfaced like an apparition in Heideggers early
work, 1 expresses, oddly enough, the fact that the subject or
Dasein can only be there if it is contained, surrounded, encom¬
passed, disclosed, breathed-upon, resounded-through, attuned
and addressed. Before a Dasein assumes the character of being-
in-the-world, it already has the constitution of being-in. Having

Closer to Ms than l Am Myself / 541

admitted this, it seems justified to demand that heterogeneous
statements about intimate-spheric enclosedness and openness be
brought together in an overarching pattern. The aim is thus a
theory of existential spaciousness—or, differendy put: a theory of
inter-intelligence or the stay in animation spheres. This principle
of the intimate relationship space should make it clear why a life
is always a life-in-the-midst-of-lives. 2 Being-in, then, should be
conceived as the togetherness of something with something in
something. We are therefore asking—we shall repeat the thesis—
about what is known in current terminology as a “media theory”
What are media theories but suggestions of ways to explain the
how and the whereby of the connection between different exis-
tents in a shared ether?

Looking around in search of models for such an undertaking,
one is pulled nolens volens into the broad field of the Old Euro¬
pean theological tradition. It is above all the Greek, and even
more the Latin Church Fathers and Doctors who, in their trea¬
tises on the Trinity, their mystical theologies and their doctrines
of the two interlocking natures of the God-man, occupied them¬
selves with the question of how to think the containedness of
conceived and created natures in the one God, as well as Gods
relationship with Himself. It was inevitable that these branches
of dogmatics would become a school of reflection on the being
intimate relationships. While it is characteristic of modern
thought that it begins with Daseins being-in-the-world or the
systems being-in-its-environment, it is the proprium of Christian
monotheism, and even more of philosophical monotheism, that
it must begin with the being-in-God of all things and souls. 3 As
the all-pervading God, who is beyond all finite localizations,
cannot be anywhere other than everywhere in Himself,* there

542 / Bubbles

seems to be no alternative to being-in for theonomic thought.
God is in Himself and the world is in God—so where could the
slightest remainder of that which is be located, if not in the
circle of influence of this absolute In? One cannot seriously
speak of externality in a world that is God’s work and extension.
Nonetheless, the totalized inside of God is provoked by a dis¬
ruptive outside whose theologically correct title is “creation after
the fall.” For where are the people who live in sin, or willfulness,
or freedom if not outside, so to speak—albeit in a licensed exter¬
nality that, because creatureliness should never be able to deny
the connection to the originator entirely? And where if not out
there below should a savior look for the fallen souls that are to
be led home?

The emergency for the theological question of the In, then,
is triggered by two logically disturbing relationships: firstly, the
problematic one between God and the human soul, of which it
is initially far from clear how it could continue to be in God or
with Him after the Fall; and secondly, God’s eccentric-intimate
relationships with Himself, which, in the light of His self-exit in
the guise of the savior, encouraged the most pensive of investiga¬
tions. So how, and in what sense, could one say that humans—or
the human soul—are still contained in God, even in their fallen
state? And how, and in what sense, should we henceforth think
of God, after His incarnation and Pentecostal outpouring, as
seamlessly contained in Himself? These two questions triggered
two mighty waves of theological reflection on the conditions of
being-one and being-in: the Christian era identifies itself by the
urge to reflect on God and space in fundamental-theoretical
terms; it is the golden age of subtle topologies dealing with places
in the non-where. For if God were the absolute vessel, how thick

Ooser to Me Thar I Ain Myself / 543

would its walls be? How was it possible to go forth to the outside
from within Him? Why did He not want to take everything He
had created back into Himself unconditionally? And by what
mediation might lost things possibly return home? While the
question as to the relationship between God and the soul is
mostly answered in the mode of biunity theories, the question as
to the nature of God s self-inhabitation finds its answer primarily
through Trinitarian doctrines.

For the present spherology, these discourses are not interesting
for their religious claims or their dogmatic willfulness; we are
not visiting them as attractions from intellectual history. They
are only of legitimate concern to us to the extent that, until
recently, they had a virtually unchallenged monopoly on funda¬
mental intimacy-logical reflection. Only Platonic erotology had
been able, in contemporary adaptations, to break the predomi¬
nance of Christian theology in the field of the theory of intimate
connections. Anyone wanting to learn more closely about the
spirit of closeness and more intimately about the spirit of inti¬
macy before the advent of modern depth psychologies in the
eighteenth century inevitably had to turn to the most withdrawn
regions of the theological tradition. In this tradition, as far as the
more esoteric aspects of God-soul relationships were concerned,
mystical transmission was almost the sole authority; anyone
interested in the inner life of the so richly and enigmatically self-
referential life of God had to tackle the daunting massif of
Trinitarian speculation. It is in these still rather inaccessible areas
that the patinated treasures of a premodern knowledge of pri¬
mary relationships lie stored. Much of what preoccupies modern
psychologists and sociologists concerning the concepts of inter¬
subjectivity and inter-intelligence is prefigured in the theological

5.44/ Buboes

discourses that, in thousand-year-old serenity, deal with the
intertwined co-subjectivity of the God-soul dyad and the co¬
intelligence, cooperation and condilection of the intra-godly
Trinity. Thus, if the concern is to deal with participatory phe¬
nomena and structures of constitutive being-in-each-other and
being-with-each-other at a fundamental-conceptual level, parts
of theological tradition can become a surprisingly informative
source for the free spirit. It is in theological surrealism, as will
be shown, that the first spheric realism lies hidden. Only
through its reconstruction can we sufficiently clarify what
immanence actually means.

This applies first and foremost to the field of God-soul relation¬
ships. Whoever attempts to comprehend the language games of
mystical theology about the souls reentry into the divine sphere is
immediately faced with a subtle web of statements about de-
objectified interconnections. For if one asks the reason for the
possible mutual attention between God and the soul, one is faced
with an unfathomable openness to relationships deeper than any
other inclinations of kinship or sympathy that can normally be
assumed between people or beings. The nature of the bond
between them cannot in any way be explained by a posteriori
affections or halfway meetings. It may be true of human love, in
a certain sense, that it does not exist at all until it occurs. What
precedes human love are—viewed from the perspective of indi¬
vidualistic modernity—two lonelinesses that are uprooted
through encounter. So one could apply Alain Badious statement
about the late Becketts meditation on love: “The encounter is
founding of the Two as such.” 5 As far as God and the soul are con¬
cerned, they do not face each other like parties or business people

Closer to Me T?wi I Am My30(- / 545

who sec a common benefit in occasional coalitions; nor do they
merely form an amorous couple occasionally—depending on the
coincidence of encounter—consumed by passion. If an intimate
reaction occurs between them, it is by no means simply a result of
what psychoanalysis—with a phrase of limited wisdom—calls a
“choice of object.” If God and the soul are connected, it is due to
an interpersonal free radical older than any partner search or
secondary acquaintance. And if their relationship at times seems
a passionate one, this is only because there is, under certain cir¬
cumstances, a resonance between them so radical that it cannot
possibly be attributed merely to the empirical contact of each with
the other. The fundamental resonance, however, if it were to be
recognized as an initial or constitutive one—how should we
conceive of it, when it is initially and usually “in the world,” and
consequendy located in a place that is characterized—vaguely
put—by a certain distance from the transcendental pole? How
should one interpret the ability of God and the soul to belong
together and to be affected by each other, when it is beyond doubt
that they cannot be unadulteratcdly connected, let alone identi¬
cal, in the status quo? Did the incident in paradise not open
up a primally painful chasm of estrangement between them?
Certainly, religious sermons have always insisted drelessly that a
re-encounter is still possible between the two estranged poles, that
this is indeed the epitome of all that is worth seeking and finding
for the soul, and that God is only waiting to lead the alienated
soul back to Himself. But such an immersion of the soul in a
renewed familiarity with its lost great other can never develop
from a mere chance acquaintance. Nor will the soul take God
back “to itself,” any more than God can simply take the soul with
him; for where would each of the two be at home separately,

646/Bubbles

outside of their encounter? If they become acquainted it is
through the souls realization that it has long known the thing it is
getting to know again; implicit in such knowing is the fact that
long ago, each took the other along with itself, in a sense, or was
taken along by the other. Hence they have, in a very unclear
fashion, already been inserted into each other, as they could not
have made each others reacquaintance if they had not previously
become estranged, yet could not have been estranged if they had
not known each other from time immemorial. (“I certainly have
seen his face somewhere,” Dostoyevsky has his heroine Nastasya
Fillippovna say of Prince Myshkin, the idiot, after their first
meeting.) 6 Their fitting-together encompasses the oldest openness
towards each other as well as the primordial rift. Because the rift
makes the relationship possible and recognizable as such in the first
place, however, the truth about the overall situation can seemingly
only come to light afterwards—and, to put it more sharply, after¬
wards from the outset. The always-already must appear in the
posterior, while in the coincidental, that which has always been
valid asserts itself with delayed force. The epitome of these post¬
ponements is salvation history, in so far as it deals with Gods
economy—his attempts to rectify soul losses after the fact. God
and the soul get to know each other because they already know
each other, but their knowing is molded from early on—or even
from the start?—by a tendency towards misjudgment that mani¬
fests itself as resistance, jealousy, estrangement and indifference.

It is Saint Augustine who, in his Confessions , developed the
dialectics of recognition from misjudgment in model-like escala¬
tions. 7 Although church historians do not place Augustine
within the mystical tradition in the stricter sense, he can certainly

Closer to Me Than I Am Myself / 547

be considered the great logician of intimacy in Western theology.
This is demonstrated outstandingly in Books I and X of the
Confessions, as well as those books of his cryptic magnum opus
De trinitate which deal with the accessibility of God through his
traces within the soul (especially Books VIII-XIV). In their
manner of writing, the Confessions in particular constitute an
epochal document of intimistic speech. Through their form'—
that of a monumental narrative prayer with inserted
dissertations—they produce a paradoxical intimate situation
coram publico : what Augustine tells his God during a form of
auricular confession in a tone of agonized self-renunciation is
simultaneously a literary and a psychagogic act before an eccle¬
siastical public. The author relies on the established speech
forms of prayer and confession, which have played a part in
structuring the theo-psychological space since the days of early
Christianity. The glorifying prayer seeks to replace the subaltern
praise of the Lord with jubilation, while the confession seeks to
outdo the forced admission through a facilitated escape to the
utterance of truth; both speech forms are thus destined to form
a sort of “unshakable foundation” for truthful speech of the
Christian type. Christian language analysis is guided by the
assumption that the revealing force of confessional speech
extends deeper than the forced disclosure of the truth through
slave torture at trials in ancient times. 8 In the matter of bringing
the truth to light, the religious confession seems more produc¬
tive than the forced juridical one, as it can already be uttered in
the hope of forthcoming mercy; under torture, however, the
motive of concealing or distorting ones own deeds or those of
others can never be eliminated lastingly and with the inner
agreement of the confessed offender. Whoever can withstand

548 / Bubbles

the pain of torture can deny to the end, and seal their lips per¬
manently in an act of resistance against the cruel interrogators.
In the religious confession, on the other hand, lying would be
nonsensical, as the very idea of the confessio hinges on realizing
the advantage of telling the truth. The reward for confession is
that whoever speaks the truth comes “into the truth”: 9 this is
precisely what begins the intimacy-logical drama that lends
Augustinian thought its lively modulation. For after the switch
to the “true religion,” truth can no longer be considered merely
a property of statements and speech; truth should form the In
in which all speaking and life seeks to be immersed. 10 The
benchmark of whether a confessing sinner is “truly opening”
himself is the pain of confession, which moves, authenticates
and purifies him and separates him from his past. Confession
traces the escape route to blatancy, as it were: it gives the Greek
idea of truth— aletheia , or unconcealedness—a Christian turn,
and thus a dialogic one; now the true word appears on the
human side as the admission, and on Gods side as revelation.
What revelation and admission have in common is that each, in
its own way, effects the a posteriori (in Christian terms: gracious)
conciliatory reopening of a lost entrance to the inside of the
other part. This leads to the repetition of tragic catharsis by
Christian means; it need hardly be said that with the truth
game of the religious confession, a prototype of Old European
psychotherapeutics entered the historical stage.

In his Confessions , Augustine drew the most radical conclu¬
sions from the equally suggestive and presuppositional model
that whoever ventures to speak the truth about himself must
already “be in the truth ” That an individual wants to declare the
truth about its turn towards the truth gives a first indication of

Ck>}6 ! to Me Than 1 Aid Mysell / 549

its being-in in the truth; and the fact that the declarer can say
what he is required to say amounts to an irrefutable truth or a
divine judgment via the quill. According to the model, the
declaration of guilt before God and the church audience would
be doomed to failure had God Himself not foreseen, approved
of, inspired and caused it. Hence the impossibility of telling the
untruth is already ordained in exemplary confessional speech.
Just as a prophet could not lie in the moment of inspiration, an
author who accuses himself of sinning in Augustines manner
cannot fall short of the truth. By positing himself as the sub¬
author in God s directing of language, he effectively states that
his confessions have been put into his mouth by the highest
authority: through his illuminated bishop, the creator of all
things puts salvifically important additions to His previous self-
declarations in writing. “Sub-author” is an analytical term for
what is usually called an apostle: for an apostle is anyone who
speaks or writes as a representative of the absolute author. 11
Consistently with this, Augustine speaks as a therapeutic apostle
in the account of his resistance to God. The Confessions can be
read convincingly as an ex cathedra medical history; they deal
with the curability of unbelief in God—through God. In this
manner, the Bishop of Hippo Regius manages discreetly to
subvert the difference between human confession of sins and
divine revelation; his admissions provoke a continuation of
revelation by other means. Whoever tells in such a fashion of
their own unsaved life, meanwhile overcome through grace, is
writing evangelistic apocrypha—additional good news of the
possibility of converting those who resist the primary good
news; in this way too, the Holy Scripture continues itself as the
success story of its own dissemination. 12

550/Bubbles

Being-in here denotes a situation in the stream of true lan¬
guage: whoever speaks in it includes their own speech in the
divine main text in such a way that (as far as possible) no exter¬
nal remainder is left. In the vita Christiana , however, the
concern is not simply to fit ones own words into the spreading
of the Lords word; ones entire existence is meant to be remolded
from a willful one to one that is contained in God . Certainly,
with a willful person of Augustine’s rank, the victim of willful¬
ness is significant: as discreetly and clearly as possible, the
Confessions make it known that on this one occasion, the reduc¬
tion of a genius to an apostle succeeded with Gods help. For
Augustine, his own conversion is therefore of epochal exem¬
plary value. He himself is the antiquity that converted to
Christianity; he is antiquity as an unholy genius and an agent
of a spiritless society that has disintegrated into atoms of ambi¬
tion and greed. In addition, however, as the co-inventor of a
new God-sphere that promises the infinite to countless people,
he is already the Christian era. As a witness to this difference,
Augustine puts on record in his Confessions that heathen ego¬
tistical externality has been overcome through a spheric
wonder—through the organized inner world of salvation
manifested in the God-man and organized by His apostolic
successors, which manifests itself in a new way in the midst of
this externalized power reality.

The once-rebellious soul drawn back into God must later,
according to Augustine, account to itself for the fact that it had
already been seen through and incorporated into a divine economy
at every moment of its seemingly independent development.
Now it admits to finding happiness under the all-pervading,
constant observation of its great other.

Closer -o Me Than I Arn Myselt / 561

And even if I would not confess to You, what could be hidden
in me, O Lord, from you to whose eyes the deepest depth of
mans conscience {abysms humanae conscientiae) lies bare? I
should only be hiding You from myself, not myself from You.

But now that my groaning is witness that I am displeasing to
myself, You shine unto me and I delight in You and love You and
yearn for You, so that I am ashamed of what I am and renounce
myself and choose You and please neither You nor myself save in
you {et nec mihi nec tibiplaeeam nisi de te). To You then, O Lord,

I am laid bare for what 1 am. [...] For whatever good I utter to
men, You have heard from me before I utter it; and whatever
good You hear from me, You have first spoken to me. 13

Just as Augustine here provides a classic articulation of his own
transparency for the absolute intelligence and his role as a medi¬
um for the great others transmission of truth, he elsewhere
expresses his existential interconnection with the all-encompassing
in formulations that present the relationship with God as being-
there l4 -in-an-encompassing-and-pervasive entity;

But how can 1 call unto my God, my God and Lord? For in
calling unto Him, I am calling Him to me: and what room is
there in me for my God {et quis locus est in me, in quo veniat in
me deus mens?), the God who made heaven and earth? Is there
anything in me, O God, that can contain You {capiat re)? All
heaven and earth cannot contain You for You made them, and
me in them. Yet, since nothing that is could exist without You,

You must in some way be in all that is: [therefore also in me,
since I am]. And if You are already in me, since otherwise I
should not be, why do I cry to You to enter into me? [...]

552 t Bubbles

Thus, O God, I should be nothing, utterly nothing,
unless You were in me—or rather unless I were in You, of
whom and by whom and in whom are all things (Romans
11:36). So it is, Lord; so it is. Where do I call You to come to,
since I am in You? Or where else are You that You can come to
me? Where shall I go, beyond the bounds of heaven and earth,
that God may come to me, since He has said: Heaven and earth
do I fill (Jeremiah 23:24).* 5

This thought movement shows a finite consciousness in the
tendency to give up itself in favor of the infinite. Here Augustine
follows the paths of Greek metaphysics, which suggests to
ephemeral life that it perish within eternal substance. If God is
the truth and the truth is substance, then the unstable subjec¬
tivity of individuals—if they are serious about the truth—must
break away from itself and escape from its inessential and illusory
state into the essential and real. Who can deny that a large
number of Christian theologies were always in more or less
explicit agreement with this basic principle of substance meta¬
physics? Where metaphysical concepts dominate, the search for
truth is understood as a run-up to the conversion from nothing
to being, or in Christian terms, as the striving from death in the
illusion to life in the truth. The Latin tradition refers to this self-
salvaging into substance as transcending—a word that is spoken
of too little if one considers that it made history in Old European
thought and feeling. Thinking in terms of transcendence, as
Christian metaphysics too, organizes the escape of inane exis¬
tence to the good reason. It characterizes the ingenuity of
Augustinian theology that it began by balancing out the
inescapable metaphysical emancipation from oneself with Gods

Closer to Me Tha'vl Am Myself 7 663

accommodation of the seemingly null self. Augustine forces the
illuminated soul to immerse itself in its own complexity in order
to uncover within it the traces of the God who is thrice folded
into Himself The null subjects exit from itself and its overstep¬
ping into substance are requited, or rewarded, with an entry of
the substance into the subject, which is henceforth essentially
used to become acquainted with God through the creature and
to hold onto this acquaintance. In this manner, subjectivity or
the “inner human,” as Augustine calls it—now elevated to a
carrier of Gods trace—is afforded uncommonly great dignity.
The human spirit may roam through the universe of created
things at all levels, but it will never find what it is searching for
outside. If God is to be found, it is only after the searcher has
turned inwards. In his own mental faculties the successful
searcher experiences a reflection of what he is looking for.

See now how great a space I have covered in my memory, in
search of Thee, O Lord; and I have not found Thee outside it.

For I find nothing concerning Thee but what 1 have remem¬
bered from the time 1 first learned of Thee. From that time, I
have never forgotten Thee. For where 1 found truth, there I
found my God, who is Truth itself, and this I have not for¬
gotten from the time I first learned it. Thus from the time I
learned of Thee, Thou hast remained in my memory (manes in
memoria med ), and there do I find Thee, when I turn my mind
to thee and find delight in Thee (in te). 16

But where in my memory do you abide, Lord, where in
my memory do You abide? What resting-place (cubile) have
You claimed as Your own, what sanctuary built for Yourself?

You have paid this honor to my memory, that You deign to

554 / Bubbles

abide in it; but I now come to consider in what part of it
You abide. 17

And indeed why do I seek in what place of my memory
You dwell (habites) as though there were places in my memory?
Certain I am that You dwell in it, because I remember You
since the time I first learned of You (ex quo te didici ), and
because 1 find You in it when I remember You. 18

Where then did I find You to learn of You, save in Your¬
self, above myself (in te, supra me )? Place there is none, we go
this way and that, and place there is none. 19

Late have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new;
late have I loved thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I
outside [...]. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee. 20

Now it becomes clear why the soul that seeks to clarify its rela¬
tionship with God inherently requires time to do so. Though
God s connection to the soul is transhistorical, the souls connec¬
tion to God is temporal or historical in so far as history, from the
Christian perspective, is the affair between the finite and the infi¬
nite. 21 In this affair, the decisive event always occurs late on. The
soul is fortunate if it is fortunate late on; being fortunate late on
means learning to love the right thing properly, just in time. At
the center of genuinely historical events, thus understood, stands
the precarious retrieval of the souls from their self-inflicted exter¬
nality. In Augustine, the affair character of the relationship
between the soul and God is marked by the reference to learning
of him. 22 This, as shown above, refers to a knowledge that
cannot be an entirely posterior one; if the soul gets to know God
again, this is a coincidence with nothing coincidental about it; its
progress uncovers the a priori interconnection between the two.

Closer to Me Than I Am Mysetf /555

The gathering of knowledge—which initially means Augustine’s
conversion and bible study—necessarily deepens insight into an
original self-knowledge that extends back to before the affair,
that is to say before the estrangement and its reversal. In his
interpretation of this primal acquaintance, Augustine lays his
Catholic cards on the table: if the soul goes back into its outer¬
most extreme, it does not—as it demands in metaphysical
transcendence—achieve its complete self-negation in substance;
rather, it only climbs up to that mysterious place where—
despite being held in the most intimate containedness—it began
to set itself apart from God in non-violent difference: we are
referring to the moment of creation and the breath of life that
turned the clay creature into a human. 23 Augustine always
cultivated the gentle primal differentiation of the soul from
God’s totality with the greatest discretion, never allowing him¬
self to be seduced into statements that would inevitably have put
him in an awkward position. He made a wide berth around the
mystery of the soul’s pregnancy in God, and he barely ever spoke
affirmatively of a unto. The only certainty for him is that the
soul’s differentiation from God was a process of creation in
which identity and difference both receive their due; the bibli¬
cal catchword for this balance is the image of God. Orthodox
and Catholic, Augustine clings to the doctrine of the soul’s crea-
tureliness. For him there is no longer any question of sharing
that Neoplatonic and Gnostic exuberance which seeks to give
the spirit soul the same age and value as God. In relation to the
epitome of the spirit, God, the individual soul is in Christian
terms indisputably the younger one, though its juniority does
not impair the intimate bond of kinship; even as created and
younger, the soul is still spirit from spirit. Before the start of the

556 / Bubbles

estranging affair—that is, before the egotistical revolt and its
miserogenic trace of violence—there is no a priori sufficient
reason why the younger should have become estranged from the
older. In his interpretations of Genesis, Augustine therefore
places great value on the successful primary coexistence in
paradise—for it is meant to prove that the creation of humans
is something that was not doomed to failure from the start.
Without the honeymoon of the creation morning, after all, the
exclusion of the individual soul from God would itself have
been a disaster of the creator Gods making, and the creation as
such would prove an inescapable trap for the soul. That would
compromise the creator, however, and a savior could only come
into play as the non-identical one; only He, the completely
other, would know what the soul requires for its salvation.
Orthodoxy must turn away in horror from such Gnosticizing
atrocities. If all is to be as it Catholically should, one must insist
on a joyful primal acquaintance between the created soul and its
creator. Only then does the fatal affair explain the rest—Adams
wanton fall into hubris and his era, also known as world history
(which is balanced out by the counter-time, namely salvation-
historical time). If this primal acquaintance is renewed, the soul
can sink back to its place beyond all physical places in the cer¬
tainty that the great other inheres in it more deeply than it does
itself: interior intimo meo? A

One can see that in the theo-psychology and theo-eroticism from
the time of the Latin Fathers, an analytics of being-in was for¬
mulated that showed no lack of complexity or explicitness. If
there was a way to develop the Augustinian logic of intimacy
further, then only by radicalizing its already fully crystallized

Closer to Me Than I Am Myself / 567

structures. Above all, this concerns the hot spot in the Augustinian
field of intimacy—the latently current relation of primal
acquaintance between God and the soul. It is easy to understand
why the interpretation of this relation held a latent heterodox
potential, and equally that this had to be released once genuinely
mystical temperaments undertook attempts to radicalize the
God-soul relation to the point of pre-relative unions. This
ascetic-theoretical spectacle unfolded—usually in discreet
forms—behind the dense curtain of Christian metaphysics, of
which Martin Buber, among others, showed at the start of the
twentieth century that it is mirrored in the mystical testimonies
of the other monotheistic traditions, as well as the ecstatic disci¬
plines of world cultures. 25 Only occasionally, especially at the
trials of heretics, was this curtain lifted to give the audience a
glimpse of battles in the non-sensory realm. In mystical litera¬
ture, the analytics of being-in developed into an exercise in
biunity that brought forth virtuosos of its own. It was under
mystical-theological patronage that thinking in reciprocal inter¬
connections first grew into that highly explicit form which still
lends such documents an enthralling nimbus of relevance
today—even if one cannot say for what they are relevant. If
countless modern readers found the body of mystical literature
not simply vaguely fascinating, but actually meaningful, it was
probably because in its dark clarity, the mystical text emits a con¬
ceptual and visual potential for which no comparable substitute
has been found so far: we mean a theory of that strong relation¬
ship which can only be understood as bi- or co-subjectivity—in
our terminology, a microspheric dual or elliptical bubble.

That the connection to something of the same kind is not
something produced afterwards or additionally between monadic

558 / Baubles

substances or lonely individuals, but for some beings the very
mode of being: this is a thought that precisely the philosophically
conditioned intelligences could not initially understand. It had
to be worked out from the forbidding material of fundamental
concepts in Greek-Old European thought in a laborious and
hazardous exercise. If it were still possible to claim a cunning of
reason in intellectual history, one could say it was at work when
the aim was to assert, with the aid of mystical and Trinitarian
theologies, the idea of the strong relationship against the pre¬
vailing grammar of the Western culture of rationality—and
hence against the fixation on substances and essentialities that
had driven the European process of reason since the ancient
Greeks. Even today, despite dialectical, functionalist, cybernetic
and media-philosophical revolutions in our way of thinking, the
cause of the strong relationship is by no means won; in the
current human sciences, the idea of constitutive resonance is still
as much in need of explanation as the affair between God and the
soul in mystical theology once was. It is precisely in modernity,
not least where it seeks to be profound or radical, that the dogma
of a primary human loneliness is propagated more triumphantly
than ever. It is no mere coincidence that in todays common
parlance, what one terms a relationship is something that takes
place between individuals who have met by chance and who,
while still frequenting each other, are already practicing how to
do without each other some day. The mystical task, on the other
hand, was to understand the relationship not as posterior and
fortuitous, but rather fundamental and immemorial. If religious
mysticism had had an anthropological mandate, it would have
been to explain in general terms why individuals are not primarily
defined by inaccessibility to others. If mysticism were to speak in

Closer :o Me Than l Am Myse ! f / 559

a moral voice, its demand would be: warm up your individual life
past its melting point—and do what you wish. If the soul thaws,
who could doubt its inclination and aptitude to celebrate and
work with others?

To grasp the meaning of this insight, it will be advantageous
for the free spirit to emancipate itself from the anti-Christian
affect of recent centuries as a tenseness that is no longer neces¬
sary. Anyone seeking to reconstruct basic communional and
communitary experiences needs to be free of anti-religious reflexes.
Did early Christianity not find its strength precisely in basic
communal experiences? Their self-interpretation urged a new
theory of the spirit, one that would articulate why humans are
able to be together in animated communes. In Pauls doctrine of
the spirit, especially his statement that God $ love is poured out
into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which is given to us
(Romans 5:5), the principle of a solidarizing unifying power is
given its classical formulation. Admittedly it primarily concerns
the access of souls to their own kind; it is a long way from the
pneumatic enthusiasm of early Christian communal experiences
to the pretension of some medieval mystics to break through the
barrier between God and the individual soul entirely.

As far as the mystical dual in the stricter sense is concerned, there
is an immeasurable body of literature in which, with a wealth of
impoverished words, the souls intimate advances to God are
developed to the point of a complete dissolution of boundaries
and unification. If one encounters almost without exception, in
language-critical terms, stereotypes and variations in this field,
it is because in the Christian-Old European space—as in the
Islamic—the final stages of the affair between God and the soul

560 /Bubbles

The outside view of being-in: the angtTs arrow and the rays from above combine
in a synergy of penetration. Lorenzo Bernini, 1'be Ecstasy of Saint Teresa\ Santa
Maria della Vittoria, Rome

are under a Neoplatonic monopoly, however occult the connec¬
tion to this source might be. Whichever documents one opens,
among the most diverse authors’ names and the most colorful
classifications of direction and origin, there is a single model that
succeeds in reaching the mystical finale; the Neoplatonic mode
of reading becomes inevitable, even where authors miss their own
dependence on the Plotinic model and readers are deceived
through the anonymity of the source. The thoughts expressed
by innumerable authors in countless documents in a tone of
passionate declaration endlessly reproduce the same sequence of
primal scenes and ending scenes that the soul must go through

Cosor to Me Th&r l Arr My set / 56"

on its way back into the One. Looking at the mystical move¬
ments of medieval Europe, one has to note that the most
arousing thoughts of ones own are foreign thoughts which use
our heads. So even if medieval theology faculties had die true
doctrine firmly under their control, the most talented still
studied—it is hard to say how—at a Plotinic tele-academy 26 that
disseminated late Greek knowledge about salvation and the
ascent of the soul under Christian pseudonyms.

As one document among coundess others, we shall quote a
passage from The Mirror of Simple Souls> a work written shortly
before 1285 and condemned as heretical, by the Beguine Mar¬
guerite Porete, who was born around 1255 near the northern
French town of Valenciennes and burnt at the stake as a heretic on
June 1, 1310 on the Place de Greve in Paris. Her book shows—in
a marked anti-ecclesiastical tone—the search for an unmediated
consummation of biune union between the soul and God.

This Soul, says Love, has six wings like the Seraphim. She no
longer wants anything which comes by a mediary. This is the
proper being of the Seraphim: there is no mediary between
their love and the divine Love. They always possess newness
without a mediary, and so also for this soul: for the soul does
not seek divine knowledge among the masters of this age, but
in truly despising the world and herself. Great God, how great
a difference there is between a gift from a lover to a beloved
through a mediary and a gift that is between the lovers
without a mediary! 27

It is clear that the rejection of a mediary between the commu¬
nion partners must ultimately eliminate any third entity. Thus

562 / Bubbles

the gift can neither have a bearer nor remain a material offering;
it is absorbed into the self-gift of the giver. Marguerite Porete
speaks at length about the necessity for the soul on the way to
simplicity to annihilate itself to the point where its particularity
no longer obstructs the gift of the divine self-giver. Her aim is
that in future, through this great change of subject, the will of
God shall will for her and through her:

And thus the Soul removes herself from this will, and the will
is separated from the Soul and dissolves itself, and [the will]
gives and renders itself to God, whence it was first taken,
without retaining anything of its own in order to fulfill the
perfect Divine Will, which cannot be fulfilled in the Soul
without such a gift, so that the Soul might not have warfare of
deficiency. [...] Now she is All, and so she is Nothing, for her
Beloved makes her One . 28

It is conspicuous how, in Marguerites text, the theo-erotic
bipolar resonance figures are increasingly surpassed by the meta¬
physical urge to become one. This urge is so powerful in the
self-willed Beguine that it wastes little time with the usual
degrees and steps of ascent; Marguerite Porete has no interest in
the drawn-out stages of the itineraries, where the souls path to
God is detailed in a wholesomely roundabout form. She is, in a
sense, already at her goal from the start, and if the mystical
exercise could normally only be carried out correctly as the
patient elaboration of an impatient haste, speed itself becomes an
agent of illumination in the case of this illuminated author. The
impossible task has scarcely been uttered before its completion is
announced. What unleashes mystical individualism is the end of

Closer :o Me Than I Ati Myse.f / 563

the speed limit for self-enjoyment in God; thus the dual structure
of the affair between God and the soul is also infringed upon and
subsequently bypassed. The Neoplatonic ambition to exit the
dual entirely in order to be subsumed under the One would
ultimately, if it became the standard, suffocate the love play of
the interwoven partners—were it not for the fact that the
mystics unfettered verbal elan ensures, through an opposing
effect, that the affair still continues expressively and loquaciously
even at the apex of its completion. At the climax of the relation¬
ship, the soul declares its peculiar unrelatedness; it now claims to
have ascended to a space of immanence preceding all difference:

All things are one for her, without a why, and she is nothing in
a One of this sort. Thus the Soul has nothing more to do for
God than God does for her. Why? Because He is, and she is
not. She retains nothing more of herself in nothingness, *
because He is sufficient of Himself, that is, because He is and
she is not. Thus she is stripped of all things because she is
without existence, where she was before she was. She has from
God what He has, and she is what God is through the trans¬
formation of love, in that point in which she was before she
flowed from the Goodness of God . 29

Like coundess related documents, Marguerite Poretes resolutely
Neoplatonic account demonstrates the high price of conquering
the language of unconditional love or the primordial relationship.
The souls absolute belonging to God, and both to each other,
could only be stated at a price, namely if the souls pole of rela¬
tion made room, through self-annihilation, for the great other to
enter it. With this, the very thing that was meant to make the

564 / Bubbles

relationship a radical one destroys it. Where there were two, one
of them must now leave; where there was a soul, God is to
become everything. The idea of mutual inhabitation, of which
Augustine was able to speak in a rich instrumentation, sinks into
the background when confronted with the overheated Neopla¬
tonic model of union. In exchange for this loss of reciprocity, the
chance is taken to date the intimacy between God and the soul
back to pre-creation regions. Consequently, at least on the
semantic surface of mystical confession, the subject s attraction to
self-sacrifice in favor of substance inevitably becomes dominant.
What was supposed to be a mystical wedding seemingly becomes
the self-burial of the subject in substance. But are our ears
deceiving us? Does the ear-pricking opening of a great speech on
the strong relationship end with this pitifully paradoxical revoca¬
tion “In God 1 am nothing, and God can have no relationship
with nothing”? Indeed: when it comes to the only correct
wording, the schema of transcendence steals the word from the
tip of the tongue of the concern of resonance—just as well-
rehearsed language routines lend false tongues to the unsaid as it
wells up. Under the predominance of the metaphysical code, the
new words for the strong relationship sprout only hesitantly, like
some unheard-of foreign language. What must be expressed
semantically using the figure of self-annihilation, however—the
radical participation in the great other and the stimulated inter¬
weaving with its being—permits the most impetuous self-release
of the new speech event in the poetics of the mystical text and its
performative unfolding: uttering formulas of abdication, Porete
progresses to a state of the most penetrating intensity. She makes
herself a privileged resonant body of her radiant other. Naturally
God is the One in all everywhere, but here He irrupts into an

Closer to MaTnan t Am Myself / 566

individual voice, formulating Himself through its vibrations. At
least, that is what this voice is presently claiming. Who could
distinguish between the voices now! Who is something, who is
nothing? The reader of the mystical text can say this much:
instead of reaching the inside of God through a silent withdrawal,
the de-selfed subject plunges into the most daring of perfor¬
mances, as if the unutterable one somehow needed to be uttered
through it, assisted by the martial law of movedness. We know of
Marguerite Porete that she sometimes traveled through the
country like a show-woman, reciting from her mirror of souls in
front of highly diverse audiences. The Neoplatonic diva managed
to prove to her contemporaries that the enjoyment of God—
which was simultaneously the first legitimized form of
self-enjoyment—can liberate itself from church walls and
churchmen; Marguerite Porete is one of the mystical mothers of
liberality. Would this make mysticism be the matrix for perfor¬
mance art? Would performance then be the impulse that releases
the subject? Would the subject be the manifest side of biune
movedness? Would movedness be an emergence from the shared?
And God an expressionist through the woman?

Suggestions of this genre can be relativized and inspected
through a sideways glance at an example from medieval Iranian
mystical theology. Even in the dogmatic milieu of Islam, Neo¬
platonic impulses had manifold offshoots, both orthodox and
subversive ones, and brought forth a rich world of forms of
biunity-mystical asceticisms and language games. In this context
too, one question became especially pressing for the mystical
protagonists: how can the word of God be staged in a presendst
fashion? And here also, the executioner pushed his way into the

566 f Bubbles

foreground as the most important critic of the theater of God.
Among the most impressive actors in the Islamic theodrama is
the poet-theologian Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi, also
known as Suhrawardi Maqtul, “The Murdered,” born in 1155 in
the northwest Iranian province of Zanjan. At the instigation of
orthodox legal scholars, who accused him of questioning the
privileged prophetological status of Mohammed, he was executed
on Saladins orders on July 29, 1191 in Aleppo. In Iranian tradi¬
tion, the memory of Suhrawardi, whose followers also call
him Sohrevardi Shahid, “The Martyr,” is preserved as Shaikh
al-Ishracj , which is conventionally translated as “Master of
Illumination”; as Henry Corbin has shown, however, a more
accurate description of the “philosophy of illumination” would
be the “doctrine of the rising of light in the Orient.” In
Suhrawardis teachings one sees a confluence of principles from
Koranic theology and Neoplatonic arguments, as well as traces of
the ancient Persian theosophy of light. We shall cite the ninth
chapter from “The Language of the Ants” [. Lughat-i-Muran \, a
twelve-part sequence of short symbolic tales:

All the stars and constellations spoke to Idris—peace be upon
him. He asked the moon: “Why does your light decrease
sometimes and increase at others?” She replied: “Know you!
that my body is black, but polished and clear and I have no
light. But when I am opposite to the sun, in proportion to the
opposition an amount of his light appears in the mirror of my
body; as the figures of the other bodies appear in the mirror.
When I come to the utmost encountering I progress from the
nadir of the new moon to the zenith of the full moon.” Tdris
inquired of her: “How much is his friendship with you?” She

Closer to Me Tnan I Anri Myself / 567

replied: “To such an extent that whenever I look at myself at
the time of encountering I see the sun, because the image of
the sunlight is manifest in me, since all the smoothness of my
surface and the polish of my face is fixed for accepting his light.

So every time when I look at myself, I see the sun. Do you not
see chat if a mirror is placed before the sun, the figure of the
sun appears in it? If by Divine decree the mirror had eyes and
looked at itself when it is before the sun, it would not have
seen but the sun, in spite of its being iron. It would have said
*1 am the sun,’ because it would not have seen in itself anything
except the sun. If it says ‘I am the Truth’ or ‘Glory be to me!
How great is my glory* its excuse must be accepted; even the
blasphemy wherefrom I came near, verily, you are me.*” 30

Using conventional poetic images, Suhrawardis didactic tale
presents the known thought figures of Neoplatonic speculations
on biunity, muted in Islam-typical fashion by references to the
categorical distance between God and all other beings. This ten¬
dency towards subordination comes to light sufficiently clearly,
in what initially seem irreversible gradations, in the images of the
sun and the moon; not without reason is Islam, in keeping with
its name, a religion of subjugation in the ancient ontological
style. In its exuberance, however, the moon is subversively granted
the license to think itself the sun, as long as it simply respects the
original relationship that gives the first light primacy over its
reflections. Thus the second element is not only connected to the
first by participation in reflection; it also has an original right to
exuberant communication with the origin itself. Through its
pictorial character, Arab mystical poetry seems more deeply
infused with dual-erotic resonance knowledge than any other—

568/Bubbles

the only work in the Judeo-Christian tradition that is compara¬
ble to Arab theo-poetics in this respect would be the Song of
Songs—but this poetic speech is also controlled by the unre¬
lenting monarchy of substance, which is overdetermined by the
monarchy of Allah. Islamic theology is constrained even more
strictly than Christian theology to reject the souls pretensions to
equal worth with the Highest; by pushing the one God and the
one substance further away in subservient superelevations,
however, the Islamic language of devotion stirs the theo-erotic
embers. Blissful yearning takes care of the rest; and last of all the
inflamed souls, desiring light, know how to go about forcing
their dissolution in the fiery substance. What the moon cannot
do through its discrete position in relation to the sun, the but¬
terfly will achieve in the flame. The death-seeking moth
represents the spirit of exaggeration that brings literature and
emergency close together. Suhrawardis flight around the fire
becomes audible in the two quotations from the sayings of the
Sufi martyr al-Hallaj (858-922), who is said to have beaten the
“drum of unity.” With the notorious proclamation of anal-
haqq —“I am the truth”—and the final statement of our parable,
Suhrawardi adopts two of the most successful and incendiary
theo-erotic phrases. In his doctrine of angels—which we shall
not examine here—Suhrawardi found a way to bring the rela¬
tionship between the soul and God into equilibrium in an
intermediate region; human souls are not simply immediate to
God, even if they strive back to their origin in His direction; they
possessed preexistence in the angel world; they split, for whatever
reasons, into two parts, of which one remains close to God on
high while the other descends to the “fortress of the body.” 31 The
worldly part, unhappy with its lot, searches for its other half and

Closer ic Me Than i Am Myself / 569

must seek to unite with it again to regain completeness. With
these mythical figures, which transfer Plato’s tale of the first
humans to the angelic sphere, Suhrawardi cancels the fatal suc¬
tion of substance monism, making space for images that are
suitable for the never-ending task of developing the original
augmentation by creating ever new forms and symbols. The sub¬
lime idea of benosis or unio may have established and spread the
philosophical prestige of mystical Neoplatonism; its angelology is
far more fruitful in psychological terms, however, because it
formulated—without making concessions to the ambiguous
unionistic references to annihilation—the creatively forward-
looking, original augmentability of the soul in images, if not in
words. It testifies to the symbol-demanding force of productive
separateness, which manifests itself as a primordial duality. Its
traces can be seen not only in the Islamic hemisphere, but also
the Christian. Angelology is one of the historically indispensable
means of access to the theory of medial things. 32 Media theory,
for its part, opens up perspectives on an anthropology beyond
the individualistic semblance.

As far as mystical theology in the Latin West is concerned, it
reached its culmination in the work of Nicholas of Cusa
(1401-1464). In his work, we find penetrating analyses on the
question of how to envisage the being-in of finite intelligences in
the infinite intelligence of God—a turn in which we justifiably
see a didactic transformation of the question of the soul’s
relationship with God. We are essentially prepared, broadly at
least, for any adequate elucidation of this relationship through
the Augustine-animated Platonizing discourse on God’s being-
aware within those who recognize Him and the sublation of the

570 / Bubbles

Rogier van der Weyden, Image of the Archer: The All-Seeing

Close/ ro Me Than I An Myself / 571

knower in the known; nonetheless, Nicholas of Cusa enriched
this basic figure with nuances that can be seen as explicit gains
for the theory of the strong relationship. It is especially in his
treatise On the Vision of God (De visione Dei) from 1453 that the
Cusan adds to the known repertoire of statements about the
intertwinement of God and the soul with a number of unfor¬
gettable pictorial and argumentative aspects. This applies not
least to the splendid analogy of the painting that opens the
treatise. Nicholas speaks about recent examples of portrait art
that give the observer the feeling of being looked at by them in
a very particular way, wherever one happens to be standing. If
one can believe the text, the author enclosed one such painting
as an object of devotional exercise when he sent his dissertation
to the monks at the Abbey of Tegernsee in Bavaria.

I am sending, to your charity, a painting that I was able to acquire
containing an all-seeing image, which I call an icon of Gtfd.

Hang this up some place, perhaps on a north wall. And
you brothers stand around it, equally distant from it, and gaze
at it. And each of you will experience that from whatever place
one observes it the face will seem to regard him alone. [...]
Next, let the brother who was in the east place himself in the
west, and he will experience the gaze as fastened on him there
just as it was before in the east. Since he knows that the icon is
fixed and unchanged, he will marvel at the changing ( mutatio )
of its unchangeable gaze. [...] He will marvel at how its gaze
was moved, although it remains motionless (immobilius move-
batur ), and his imagination will not be able to grasp how it is
moved in the same manner with someone coming forth to
meet him from the opposite direction. [...] He will experience

572 / Boobies

that the immobile face is moved toward the east in such a way
that it is also moved simultaneously toward the west, that it is
moved toward the north in such a way that it is also moved to
the south, that it is moved toward a single place in such a way
that it is also moved simultaneously toward all places, and that
it beholds a single movement in such a way that it beholds all
movements simulaneously.

And while the brother observes how this gaze deserts no
one, he will see that it takes diligent care of each, just as if it
cared only for the one on whom its gaze seems to rest and for
no other, and to such an extent that the one whom it regards
cannot conceive that it should care for another (quod curam
alterius agat). He will also see that it has the same very diligent
concern for the least creature (minimae creaturae) as for the
greatest (quasi maximae ), and for the whole universe, 33

What is notable about the analogy is that it transports us to an
interfacial or, more precisely, an interocular scene. One can
admire the artful daring with which Nicholas bridges the chasm
between the universalist and individualist theological motifs.
How could a summary and aspecific God for all simultaneously
be an intimate God for each and every person? Only a logically
and existentially convincing answer to this question could pro¬
vide the theological foundation for a religion that simultaneously
inspires imperiality and intimacy. The painted portrait with the
living, wandering eyes is an excellent representation of a God
who, even as He pantocratically oversees all of humanity, only
actually turns to each individual. Here we see a God of intensity
whose outpouring of power is as present in the minimum as it is
in the maximum. God cannot love the whole of mankind any

Closer iq Me Tnan I Arn Mysef / 573

more than a single human being {just as, according to a similarly
constructed proposition by Wittgenstein, the whole earth cannot
be in greater distress than one soul). 34 The reference to the pres¬
ence of the maximum in the minimum lends a sharper logical
profile to the familiar idea that God distinguishes the individual
soul by being-in inside it. Certainly the metaphor of the portrait
with the static yet wandering eyes cannot be developed further
beyond the exterior encounter between the subject and its circum¬
spect observer. As it presents an external object, the picture on the
wall remains at an unbridgeable distance from the believer.
Nicholas is only concerned with placing Gods eye into the indi¬
vidual, in a twofold sense: as my internalized constant observation
by the great other and as the fluctuating inner waking of my own
intelligence. The eye of God, equipped with absolute vision, is
implanted in my own eye—in such a way, admittedly, that I am
not blinded by its all-seeing nature, but can continue to see in my
local and corporeal perspectives in the way I am able.* Nicholas
draws the doctrine of the portrait metaphor—the constant
following of my movements by the eyes on the wall—into the
soul itself: it must now envisage itself locked inside the field of
view, with an absolute eyesight that calls everything into existence
through its gaze, constantly encompassing and seeing through the
objects of that gaze. He thus creates a wonderful plausibility for
the idea that even in my inner life, I am intended and contained
in the calmly following gaze of a total intelligence. However I
might go from east to west with my thoughts and feelings, the
eyes of the great other within me still follow me into every
position in my life of thoughts and passions. In seeing, I am
always seen—to such a degree that I can believe myself destined
to exhaust Gods entire eyesight for myself. This calling gives me

574 / Bubbles

a direct sense of the reason for my similarity to God, for I am
factually gifted (or, in medieval terms, enfeoffed) with eyesight of
my own and see an open world around me; thus I imitate God s
worldview or world-espial in absolute world-immanence. From a
psychological perspective: the maximum-in-minimum idea sets
me apart as the only child of the absolute. Nicholas of Cusa is
level-headed enough to emphasize that every single case, especially
my own, is like an only-child-hood—for the God of intensity,
who lacks nothing in the smallest, is equally with Himself else¬
where and everywhere, in my neighbor as much as in the universe.
His being-in-me does not restrict Him to my perspective because
His intensity, capable of infinite expansion as it must by its nature
be, cannot be diminished even by not-being-in-me. Nonetheless,
I have a valid entitlement to my own world-opening view, as if
it were the only one—assuming I keep in mind that eyesight is
not private property, but that my seeing is something like a
branch office of Gods actually infinite vision—to continue the
metaphor: the view of a preferred only child of heaven. Nicholas
finds a precise term for this branch connection that pinpoints
the contraction of universal eyesight into my own: contractio . If
I have functioning eyes and see a world, it is only through the
contraction of seeing as such to my seeing. 35

Every contraction of sight exists in the absolute, because
absolute sight is the contraction of contractions (contractio
contractionum), [...] The most simple contraction, therefore,
coincides with the absolute. Indeed, without contraction
nothing is contracted. Thus, absolute vision exists in all sight
because every contracted vision exists through absolute vision
and is utterly unable to exist without it. 36

Cosor to Me Thar I Ain Mysel* / 5/5

God, then, the actual infinite viewer or the maximum view,
contracts Himself into me, a minimum; now He is, and in this
specific sense acts, in me, Gods inhabitation in me should there¬
fore not be imagined like that of Saint Jerome in his study or the
genie in the bottle; its logic resembles that of a handing-over of
office or investiture, where official authority is transferred from
the master to the incumbent—albeit with the nuance that the
latter is simultaneously the creation of the former The nub of
this enfeoffment is that my being-me itself takes on official
character and my subjectivity is conceived and approved as a
post in Gods household. Thus Gods unextended extension
determines the sense of immanence or being-in in every respect.
My containedness in Gods magnitude can be compared to a
point in an all-encompassing ball, where the point, in its way,
mirrors and contains the ball.

Thus God acts as a lender of eyesight to humans—or more
generally as a lender of subjectivity. Here the word “fend” can be
understood both in its feudal and its bank-capitalist sense, for
both fief and credit are authentic modes of giving being or
awarding strength—self-contraction, in Cusan terms—which
reminds us of the precondition that none are eligible to be the
feudal lord or lender save the actual infinite itself. These circum¬
stances provide the last reason for the basic figure of modernity,
which is the replacement of the all-effectuating God by all¬
sweeping capital. Cusas reflections show how the most
stimulated minds of the early Modern Age were opening up to
the adventurous and serious idea that the subject, by becoming
involved through knowledge and action, works with the credit of
the absolute. This is where the change of meaning from guilt to
debts begins. 37 We are here touching on the formative process of

576 / Bubbles

the recent history of European mentality: the birth of entrepre¬
neurial subjectivity from the spirit of the mystical duty to repay. 38

That Nicholas of Cusa articulates being-in not only as an
optician (a theo-optician, to be precise), but also as an eroticist
(a theo-eroticist, to be precise), is proved by the further course
of his tract on the visio dei y which—like some later addition to
the Confessions —displays the spirit and approach of Augustine
on every page. While metaphysical optics speaks of contracted
vision, theological eroticism speaks of contracted loves. If I am
a branch-eye of God in contracted vision, then in contracted
loves I am a relay of divine love. 39 This also contracts to a
beam that penetrates me, pours over me and privileges me, as
if this love were a fountain that expresses itself as intensely in
each individual jet as in its entire overflowing. In powerful for¬
mulations, Nicholas of Cusa expands the thought that I see
because the absolute vision sees in me and through me into the
idea that I exist and enjoy as a loving being because I am held
into the world as a vessel and outlet for divine attentions and
emanations.

And what, Lord, is my life, except that embrace in which the
sweetness of your love so lovingly holds me! [...] Your seeing
is nothing other than your bringing to life, nothing other
than your continuously imparting your sweetest love. And
through this imparting of love, your seeing inflames me to
the love of you, and through inflaming feeds me, and
through feeding kindles my desires, and through kindling
gives me to drink the dew of gladness, and through drinking
infuses a fountain of life within me, and by infusing causes to
increase and to endure. 40

Qas& to Mo Than 1 Am Myserf / 577

Rudolf Steiner, blackboard drawing, 1924

This passage can be read as a poem that argues in the spirit of
the strong relationship; using images of a liquid communion, it
articulates the existential situation of participation in a circulation
of superfluity. Read in the light of the reflections above, 41 the
passage offers one of the most intimate attempts of Christian
speech to approach a conversation with the primal companion. It
is a piece of sanguine literature in the literal sense of the word—
formulated from intuition into the reality of the blood, which
provides the first communion. Being-in now amounts to allowing
oneself to be embraced, flowed through, nourished and cheered
by the divine medium of blood, and gratefully considering and
singing the praises of this embrace/flowing-through/cheering as
a primal scene. One could, by way of transposition, say that
consciousness-in includes perceiving that I am surrounded,
carried and reached through by a force that anticipates me and

578 / Bubals*

flows towards me in every sense. This understanding of being-in
remains integrated into a basic attitude that is religious and
feudal as long as the subject aligns itself with this anticipation and
this interwovenness without deviating into outraged or claustro¬
phobic reactions. The Satanism of disgust and its small change, 42
unease, would thwart an understanding of the matter itself. In
truth, the subject finds itself in a position of revolt if it ceases to
view itself as a mere vassal of being; whoever invokes capital of
their own and refuses to define their actions as work with the
credit of the absolute becomes a rebel. But have humans, from a
Catholic perspective, not always striven towards a certain inde¬
pendent power and felt irked by the unreasonable demand of
having to be grateful for everything? Was the Modern Age not
founded on the axiom that whoever begins with themselves has
shaken off the burden of compulsory gratitude once and for all?
How would one even envisage a non-rebellious monotheistically-
based anthropology, when the race of Adam exists toto genere
under the sign of Satan and has a part in his initial ingratitude?
Has the human being, from a Christian perspective, not always
been the creature that wants to reserve a part for itself? Can there
be such a thing as man in non-revolt?

The answer to this, in so far as it is affirmative, articulates
itself in the Christianized idea of service, which states that reinte¬
gration into the One converges with the ability to serve. In
examining the question of how the independent power of humans
can be placed in and under the power of God, Nicholas arrived at
a mystical politics or a doctrine of interwoven power. It gives
being-in or unconditional immanence the meaning of empower¬
ment to isolated moments of power through the actual infinite
power itself. In the first book of the dialogue De ludo globi [The

Closer to Me Than I Am Myself / 579

Game of Spheres] (1462), the learned cardinal converses with
John, Duke of Bavaria in formulations of surreal clarity about a
game invented by Nicholas, in which the aim is to position a ball
with unequal hemispheres in the center of a target drawn on the
floor. 43 They proceed to discuss the general kingship of man.

THE CARDINAL: By all means man is the small world in
such a way that he also is part of the large world. [...]

JOHN: If I grasp you correctly, then it follows that the
universe is one great kingdom and so also man is a kingdom,
but a small one within a great kingdom as the kingdom of
Bohemia is a small kingdom within the great kingdom of the
Romans, or the universal empire.

THE CARDINAL: Excellent. A man is a kingdom simi¬
lar to the kingdom of the universe, established in part of that
universe. As long as the embryo is in the mother s womb it is
not yet its own kingdom, but when the intellectual soul, which
is put in the embryo in the process of creation, is created, the
embryo becomes a kingdom, having its own king, and is called
a man. But when the soul departs, the man and the kingdom
cease to be. However, as the body was part of .the universal
kingdom of the large world before the advent of the soul, so
also, it returns to it. Just as Bohemia was part of the Empire
before it had its own king, so also it will remain if its own king
is taken away. Therefore man is directly subject to his own king
who rules in him, then he is subject to the kingdom of the
world in an indirect way. But, when he has not yet a king or
when he ceases to be, he is directly subject to the kingdom of
the world. This is why nature or the world soul exercises vege¬
tative power in the embryo as in other things having vegetative

680/ Bubbles

life. And this exercise of the vegetative power actually con¬
tinues in certain dead men in whom the hair and nails
continue to grow. 44

So the world of power, as the exercising of ruling and producing
ability, is constituted by contraction. Every human gifted with a
spirit is king through the contraction of the emperor (God) into
an individual dominion. As a human among humans, each indi¬
vidual is self-governing under the emperor, having power in its
own small world through the relationship of enfeoffment or
credit with the highest bestower of power. In the mode of con¬
traction, the imperial (divine) maximum is present in the kingly
(human) minimum. If the minimum is already a kingdom,
however, each individual, as the ruler of the kingdom, can only
be socialized in a group of royal colleagues—or a gathering of
self-governing free classes. This is the prototype of a democrazia
Christiana . With shimmering arguments, the papist cardinal
paves the way for the egalitarianism of the citizen-kings; it
would barely take a century for civil individuals and laypersons
to understand how one can claim ones earthly sovereignty as a
kingly minimum under the divine maximum. From Nicholas of
Cusa to Rousseau, one can follow the progress of that way of
thinking which sees competent service and active subservience
in any given context as the factors that enable people to be lords
and legislators in their respective domains. Cusa was the first to
give the thought its precise form; Ignatius of Loyola had the
ingenuity to implant it in monastic politics and propagate it
psychotechnically: service is the royal road to power; active
subservience and independent power are one and the same; if
you want to rule, you must serve. Serving means developing

Dosgr to Me Thao I Am Myself / 581

under a lord as energetically as if there were no lord. This is the
first subject philosophy. The Modern Age follows on smoothly
from the late Middle Ages in the idea that all forms of exercising
power constitute vassalic service in a homogeneous divine
empire that is equally intense in all its parts; thus every subject
that reaches around itself in its area of the world is allowed to
develop as a power minimum sui generis y immediate to the
empire and to God. Every minimum is a minister, and every
competent subjectivity is a civil servant of the absolute. This
opens up the path on which businessmen, public servants,
petits bourgeois and artists will be able—as previously only
clerics and nobles were—to view themselves as functionaries of
God; it is a path that will lead into the Reformation, democra¬
tism and entrepreneurial freedom. In democracy, admittedly,
individuals will no longer claim their right and duty to power
as servants of God but as owners of human rights: now humans
envisage themselves as the animal entitled by nature to stake
claims. The people of the Modern Age can only formulate the
principle of human rights explicitly after withdrawing from the
world of God and moving to the realm of nature, where,
according to the Cusan, humans are only subordinate as
embryos and corpses. One can see very clearly in this argument,
incidentally, where the paths of the Modern Age will separate
from those of the Middle Ages: while for modern people—
those who think enough—view precisely the stay of the embryo
or fetus in the womb as part of the archaic matrix of animation,
Nicholas teaches that the child only has a vegetative status
there, and does not yet belong to the realm of spirit souls. That
would make the embryos being-in-the-mother a passive pre¬
lude to spirit-animated life—and only after the allocation of

582 / Bubbles

spirit, that is to say after baptism, would the individual be
socialized not only in nature, but also in the kingdom of God.
Mutatis mutandis , Hegel essentially still taught the same.

It is easy to see how in doctrines of this type, the aftereffects of
Platonic dualism also split the meaning of being-in. Whoever is
only in nature (animated by the world soul)—even if it is the
womb—is still far from the point where the Christian or ide¬
alistic mystic demands to be. It is precisely this difference,
however, that has lost its validity at the end of our microspher-
ological exposition. Passing through the sevenfold change in the
meaning of being-in in the preceding chapters of this book, it
has become apparent how the opposition of being-in-God and
being-in-nature disappears in favor of a general logic of being-
in-the-shared-space. Through the investigations of resonance
with two or more poles, the particular perspectives of theologi¬
cal idealism and psychological materialism are recognized in
their propaedeutic achievements, then succeeded and sublated in
their results. If mystical theology, then, described the proximity
between God and the soul in terms that the free spirit also does
not forget, it is clear that its natural eye has remained as blind as
that of an unborn child which has not yet learned the difference
between being inside and being outside. Modern psychology, on
the other hand, which has been developing outside of meta¬
physics for the last two centuries, is in the process of returning
to nature, especially its culturally mediated form, what belongs
to it in its cultural states—and this is far more than any idealism
or spirit religion ever imagined. But psychology, for its part, has
been unable to arrive at a concept of the strong relationship
because it can no longer understand the difference between

Closer to Me Than I Am Myself / 583

Guercino, Saint Augustine Meditating on the Trinity

outside and inside from a position of naturalistically distorted
externality. Our microspherology, stimulable from both sides,
moves sufficiently far away from the precepts of both opponents
to gain a vision that is more than the sum of two one-eyed
views. Through its independence from both theological decla¬
rations and psychological discourses, the theory of spheres
does theoretical justice in a new way to the self-experiences of

584 i Buboles

the living being in its current tensions between inside and out¬
side positions.

In moving from the microspheric to the macrospheric interpre¬
tation of the meaning of being-in, a few remarks—however
cursory—on Trinitarian theology are indispensable. For this
discipline, in its logical structure and extension of meaning,
belongs to both dimensions: microspherology, in so far as it
articulates a three-part intimate relation—Father, Son, Holy
spirit; and macrospherology, in so far as it identifies the “persons”
of this triad as actors in a world-crossing and world-pervading
theodrama. Thus Trinitarian discourses treat both the smallest
bubble and the largest orb, the densest and the widest interior.
We will give an inkling of why, from the start, Trinitarian theology
could only advance as a theory of the strong relationship, and eo
ipso as the doctrine of a living orb,

In an early stage of this problem process, the Greek Fathers,
especially from the Cappadocians onwards, invented a new form
of meditation on surreal interpersonality. Their purpose was
initially to reformulate the New Testament statements, especially
those by John, about the singular relationship between Jesus and
God in the spirit of Greek ontotheology. This task amounted to
squaring the circle—or rather, circling the ellipse—for basic
Greek terminology was not ready to formulate communions on
equal footing between several parties in the only substance. At
this point, however, early Christianity, which had begun to
consolidate itself theologically and mission-politically, could not
retreat even a single step: when John wrote “Anyone who has seen
me has seen the Father” (14:9), “Believe me when I say that I am
in the Father and the Father is in me” (14:11), or “the Holy

Closer to MeTHan I Am Myself / 5B5

Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all
things” (14:26), this was the announcement of a program that
grew into a thought task both inevitable and explosive for the
Greek theologians and their heirs. It contained the unreasonable
demand to conceive of strong relationships at the level of the
One, but between three. That this could somehow succeed
without a tritheistic relapse may have seemed plausible to the
conventional and simple minds of late antiquity, if one assured
them often enough with authority that one was three and three
was one. The theologians, however, who stepped into the arena
of theory, standing face to face with advanced pagan philoso¬
phers to defend the intellectual honor of their religion, realized
that an abyss had opened up for orthodoxy, one that threatened
to swallow the entire conception of right and wrong. One of the
most powerful discursive vortexes of Old European culture
formed at the interface between ancient Greek and New Testa¬
ment language games. Its rotation began when the biblical talk of
relationships made the Greek ontology of essence dance. Here,
strangely enough, the learned patriarchs of the Byzantine world
acted as the dance teachers; it was they who taught the static One
the steps by which it learned to differentiate itself into eternal
triplets. This rhythmicizing revolution took no less than a mil¬
lennium to develop into a mature, lucid concept; it extends from
the Cappadocian theologians to Thomas Aquinas, in whose
doctrine of “subsistent relations” the inconceivable finally
seemed to have become conceivable after all. Through carefully
considered risks, Trinitarian speculation felt its way forwards into
the field of relational logic—as if it had been its mission to
unmask a God who could philosophically only be imagined as a
light reactor and a smooth stone eternity, revealing Him as a

586 / Bubbles

Close’- to Me Thar I Arn Myself / 587

Detail: The classical quasi-qua tern ity encompasses the Trinity and the universe

bottomless well of friendliness, and to imitate Him as the true
icon of the loving relationship. In this sense, Adolf von Harnack
was not entirely right with his sharp-edged hypothesis that older
Christian theology amounted to the gradual Hellenization of the
Gospel. It was simultaneously—and more than just casually—
the Jewish-inspired intersubjectification of Hellenism.

588 / Bubbles

How several can exist undivided in one: this basic question of
life-spheric theory initially occupied the early theologians less in
its numerical and quantitative dimension than in the spatial
disposition of the three in one. Here theology, through its own
efforts, came under pressure to explain itself topologically.
This first access to the intra-godly sphere initially displayed
unmistakable nature-philosophical undertones, even if it had
long since moved on to the inter-inhabitation of spiritual enti¬
ties. This can be observed particularly clearly in the famous lamp
analogy from the treatise The Divine Names by the late fifth-
century Syrian monk-philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite. His explanations are instructive in showing the starting
point of the later development, for they still interpret the possi¬
bility of the three divine persons being together entirely within a
Neoplatonic framework, namely the discussion on how the many
can be anchored and integrated in the one. Even Neoplatonism
already knew a pathos of the differing of the different within the
one, a pathos from which later references to the “reciprocal vali¬
dation of the person-principles of the Trinity” would still profit,

In a house the light from all the lamps is completely inter¬
penetrating, yet each is clearly distinct. There is distinction in
unity and there is unity in distinction. When there are many
lamps in a house there is nevertheless a single undifferentiated
light and from all of them comes the one undivided brightness.

I do not think that anyone would mark off the light of one
lamp from another in the atmosphere which contains them all,
nor could one light be seen separately from the others since all
of them are completely mingled while being at the same time
quite distinctive. Indeed if somebody were to carry one of the

Closer to Mo Than I Am Myseil / 589

lamps out of the house its own particular light would leave
without diminishing the light of the other lamps or supple¬
menting their brightness. As I have already explained, the total
union of light, this light that is in the air and that emerges
from the material substance of fire, involved no confusion and
no jumbling of any parts. [...]

Theology, in dealing with what is beyond being, resorts
also to differentiation. I am not referring solely to the fact that
within a unity, each of the indivisible persons is grounded
in an unconfused and unmixed way. I mean also that the
attributes of the transcendentally divine generation are not
interchangeable. The Father is the only source of that Godhead
which in fact is beyond being and the Father is not a Son nor
is the Son a Father. Each of the divine persons continues to
possess his own praiseworthy characteristics [...], 45

The images of Pseudo-Dionysius clearly present an intimistic
version of Plato’s solar metaphor. Here, Plato’s sun shines en
miniature in a strangely touching fashion, as if trifurcating via
a three-armed chandelier, withdrawn from the open world into
the houses interior. Because the sun—since Akhenaten and
Plato a heroic symbol of the monarchy of principles—is
unsuitable to represent an internal communion, or even a
separation of powers in the absolute, the mystical theologian
had to resort to the lamp analogy. This at least shares with the
solar model the fact that it represents the central power of
light—and thus denotes the original function, but can also
render plausible the transition to the idea of Trinitarian differ¬
entiation. Certainly the lamps of Pseudo-Dionysius only offer a
precarious analogy to intra-godly communication, for they

590/Bubotes

illustrate how one should imagine the interpenetration of
propagable light with other similar light, but they contribute
nothing to an understanding of the interactions between the
light partners. Their ability to interweave is envisaged more in
line with Stoical philosophies of mixed bodies than in interper¬
sonal terms—which is also evident in the obligatory analogies
of closeness and mixture among the Greek and Latin Fathers:
the being-in of the divine persons in one another—like the
merging of divine and human natures in Christ—is tirelessly
represented as the mixing of wine and water, or compared to
the propagation of aroma and sound. Everywhere one finds the
image of the glowing iron, which is presented as the interpene¬
tration of metal substance and fire substance; it also returns
several times in variations, such as images of glowing gold or
coal embers. All this is meant to express a repression-free, non-
hierarchical interweaving of substances in the same section of
space—which can be understood quite naturally as a primitive
attempt by theological speculation to approach the problem of
spatial formation in the autogenous container of the intimate
sphere. The physiological images of mixture reach their natural
conclusion in the Platonizing light-in-light metaphors, which
lead almost automatically into subtler metaphysical notions of
the spirit space. These visual figures can certainly be no more
than preparatory exercises to approach the interpersonal
dimension of the strong relationship. If one takes Pseudo-
Dionysius’ lamp analogy further, however, one can at least
develop the idea that the triune chandelier not only emits light
outwards, but also holds the inner life of the light parties. This
is most clearly suggested in the text by the negative statements,
which certainly make a great deal of the fact that the Father is

Closer to Me TTiai l Am Myself / 591

******* v

wnp^'

llffe M*i»*m»**M ******** §

FM WgiWMMM* **H^H1

9>1'V/^ VK *«* KJr*Nii*t|#H#««« *U

—- ---■■ --- TM ii '

Missal, MS 91, £ 121 r.: The Trinity as a crowned triumvirate oval

not the Son, nor the Son the Father. This Not in God brings
life or personal difference into the gleaming gray of the primal
unity. The three (or six) Nots in the Trinity (Father not Son or
Spirit; Son not Spirit or Father; Spirit not Father or Son) light
the fire of relationship in the divine space. All definition is
negation, Spinoza would later say; and all negation is relation¬
ship, the ancient theologians already taught.

The task, then, is to conceive of a difference that does not
lead into separation, that is to say becoming-external-to-one-
another; for if there is one thing in ancient theology even
more pronounced than the pathos of non-mixture or non¬
coalescence between the divine persons, it is the pathos of their
a priori connectedness. But how can unity still be envisaged
if the tripersonal model mobilizes a maximum of centrifugal

592/Bubbles

forces within it? This problem is solved through the supposi¬
tion of an expressive or discharging act in God in which
genuine differences appear without any cut surfaces or gaping
seams. A perceptible gap, after all, would indicate that the
separating externality had gained the upper hand over the con¬
tinuum of belonging together.

The Greek Fathers already managed to overcome this diffi¬
culty by ascribing to the Father two gestures of self-exit that
posit difference without endangering continuity: conception
and breath. The third of Gods expressive acts, that of making,
is passed over, as it leads not to co-divine figures but sub-divine
creatures—that is, to the sensual world and its inhabitants.
Begetting and breathing life are viewed as productions or ex¬
positions whose products remain immanent in the producer—a
circumstance for which theological acumen in the fourth century
established the admirable term * procession,” ekporeusis in Greek
and processio in Latin. Thus God “Himself” proceeds from
Himself and into the Son and the Spirit, but does not leave the
shared inside in the latter form; here there is not yet any
dialectic of self and externalization spanning processes of
estrangement, only the seamlessly shared enjoyment of a common
wealth. The intra-godly communards do not suffer any stimuli
to agonal ailments of externalization and re-appropriation as a
result of the processions; such phenomena only come into play
in the salvation-historical dimension, where the Son has to
share the agony of the world to the end. 46 Begetting and breath,
then, are expressive acts with no separable result; the begetter
retains the begotten (the Son) in Himself, just as the breathers
(the Father and the Son) keep the breathed (the Spirit) in and
with themselves; and even if the origin also goes outside

Closer to (vie ‘Vr-m I Am Mys&f i 593

itself in a sense, it by no means enters a state of externality in
relation to itself Gods interior produces itself as a relation-
workshop or an apartment in which every inhabitant is the
room of the other. The intra-godly spatial demands transform
the Platonic ball of light into a communional sphere. Its
“inhabitants” find themselves in the logically and topologically
unusual situation that their intertwinement permits an equality
of extension without spatial rivalry, as well as a sharing of
functions without competition for primacy—even if the patri-
centric original rage of the older Trinitarian discourses,
especially the Byzantine ones, tends to conceal this “egalitarian”
trait. It is precisely this unbroken sharing that is prefigured
through the ancient nature-philosophical images of contraction
and mixture. Trinity is more than a perfectly shaken emulsion
of three different liquids, however: it is meant to be no less than
an a priori love life and an original inter-intelligence superior to
the world. The inside of the living orb can be described with
this formula: three times one equals three times everything.

The doctrine of uni-trinitas, then, provided the first coherent
articulation of the idea of the strong relationship, and it
emerged in unparalleled radicality on its very first appearance:
if ever the idea of an a priori inter-“subjectivity” was taken into
consideration, it was in this intertwinement of the Trinitarian
persons. Now the idea of an absolute inside was established:
through it, physical space is sublated in relational space—the
surrealism of the persons coinherence [Ineinanderseiri\ had
found its classical model. In this space, the persons no longer
stand close to one another, each shining by itself, like the lamps
in the room of Pseudo-Dionysius; rather, by forming the primal
residential community, they make a premise pure relationship

594 / Bubbles

M * m m» iga

SfMiiiiS!

Father and Son in a shared shell, touching the Spirit

The Rothschild Canticlr. The woven band joining the Trinity gradually changes
from images of personal closeness into geo metric-onto logical rotation figures—the
peak of medieval ontography. The sequence of pictures in the canticle depicting the
Trinity comprises 24 stations.

596 1 Bubbles

or vault a first love sphere around themselves. Here the rules
are: first the love interior, then physics; first the union of three,
then their historical household. Only in this order can the rela¬
tionship between the absolute trio and its outside world be
grasped. That is why theologians place such value on conceiving
of the coinherence of the triune without any in-between to
separate them.

The learned monk John of Damascus (c. 676-749) made a
number of decisive points in his much-noted treatise An Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faiths which became a reference
work for the Latin scholastics from the late twelfth century
onwards. Here he defended the absolute synchronicity—or
syn-achronicity—of the hypostases or persons:

Accordingly, it is impious to say that time intervened in the
begetting of the Son and that the Son came into existence
after the Father. 47

Any interval of time would indicate a triumph of the external
over the primary being-inside-with-themselves of the divine
persons. At the same time, their radically relational intertwine-
ment creates the possibility of doing away with the objectionable
numerical paradox of the one that is supposed to be three:

Thus, when I think of one of the Persons (hypostasis ), 1
know that He is perfect God, a perfect substance (ousia)>
but when I put them together and combine them, I know
one perfect God. For the Godhead is not compounded, but
is one perfect, indivisible, and uncompounded being in
three perfect beings. 48

Qoeer to Me Tnan I Amr Myself / 597

! £31 S31 S31 S31 S3! S31 S3i SS1 S31

Y‘ s • ' • ‘ . : •'* •

Be not afraid, Matthias Griinewald, Isenheim Akarpiecc, inside of outer wing

598 / BubOles

This argument, which had already been rehearsed by the Cap¬
padocian Fathers in the fourth century, would remain current
until Cusa: it still returns in his text On Learned Ignorance in the
formula maximum est unum . It seems as if the perfection argu¬
ment was the early form of a naive attempt to bridge the gap
between theology and the mathematics of infinite magnitudes,
for three times one is certainly not one, but three; viewed thus,
the Trinitarian dogma would be mathematically absurd. But
three times infinity is infinity; now the dogma makes mathematical
sense. 49 The infinite is imagined in the figure of the all-encom¬
passing orb, in which externality simply cannot appear. This
model now simultaneously guarantees the absolute intimacy
and reciprocal immanence of the divine persons. A letter written
by Basil of Caesarea (329-379) to his brother Gregory of
Nyssa formulates the rejection of external differences in the
divine inner sphere:

And through whatever processes of thought you reach a con¬
ception of the majesty of any one of the three persons of the
Blessed Trinity [...] you will arrive invariably at the Father and
Son and Holy Spirit, and gaze upon their glory, since there is no
interval between Father and Son and Holy Spirit in which the
intellect will walk in a void. The reason is that there is nothing
which intrudes itself between these persons, and that beyond the
divine nature there is nothing which subsists that could really
divide it from itself by the interposition of some outside thing,
and that there is no void, in the form of an interspace in which
there is no subsistence, between the three Persons, which could
cause the inner harmony of the divine essence to gape open by
breaking the continuity through the insertion of this void. 50

Closer to Mo Tran I Am Myself / 599

% $m

I he divine persons are tied into quasi-Borromean rings from a continuous
woven band

600 / Bubbles

It should not be surprising that the internal coherence of the
unified three could only be imagined with the aid of explicit
or implicit circular and spherical models. Gregory of Nyssa, at
any rate, knew that the unbroken nature of the intra-godly
relationships could not be envisaged without a rotational concept:

Do you see the circulation of glory through the same cyclical
movements? The Son is glorified by the Spirit; the Father is
glorified by the Son. And reciprocally, the Son receives His
glory from the Father and the Only Begotten becomes the
glory of the Spirit. 51

With arguments of this type, the ancient theologians achieved
something that even modern sociologists, when they have
attempted it, have not yet been able to repeat: they arrived at
a completely de-physicalized concept of person space. With
this, the meaning of In was freed from all forms of container-
oriented thought once and for all. 52 If Father, Son and Spirit

Closer :o Me >an I Am Myself / 601

sississi ss isygi ggissf asi sgiafetf

S!&6iPl28iSIII8Si2SI8Sl^ii^}£r

The fiery hyper-knot sinks into the center of a circle announcing the advent of
the world

602 /Bj'obes

could still be localized, it was only in the housing they provide
for one another. Thus the topological surrealism of religion
entered its learned phase.

John of Damascus reintroduced the word perichoresis to
describe the strangely placeless yet self-locating coexistence of the
divine persons; its meaning in ancient Greek probably resembled
“dancing around something” or “being whirled around in a
circle.” 53 By elevating this old word of movement to a technical
term—denoting coinherence, intertwinement, interpenetration—
he performed one of the most brilliant terminological creations
in the Western history of ideas. One senses something scarcely
thinkable or unthought in the word—which is evident not least
in the fact that even theologians, to say nothing of philosophers,
are only rarely familiar with it; and when they are, their
understanding of it is usually inadequate. Whoever imagines
perichoresis as the coinherence of inseparably connected ele¬
ments is not wrong, yet is still far from grasping its essence. This
strange term represents no less than the challenging idea that the
persons cannot be localized in external spaces borrowed from
physics, but that the place in which they are located is itself
created through their interrelationship. By housing one another,
the divine relational beings, the hypostases or persons, open the
space they inhabit together and in which they call one another
into existence, pervade and acknowledge one another. Gods
privilege, then, is to be in a place for which room is only made
through relationships between the inhabitants and the co¬
inhabitants within itself. This is so difficult for trivial spatial
thought to grasp that one would have to be someone entirely
entangled in love stories—but under no circumstances a modem-
age subject—to have an intimation of its meaning.

to Me Than J. Am Myself / 603

I # «

The tripersona] structure of God is covered by the Neoplatonic orb of emanation.
The feet of the Father and Son remain visible at the edges, along with the Spirit’s
wings at the top

604 / Budbes

[...] three persons [_] united without confusion and distinct

without separation, which is beyond understanding. 54

The abiding and resting of the Persons in one another
(perichoresis) is not in such a manner that they coalesce or
become confused [...]. 55

In such a case of a residential community in the absolute, the
question is where it sets itself up and how it divides itself into the
different household duties. John of Damascus has the answer to
this question too; in Chapter 13 of An Exact Exposition of the
Orthodox Faith y he writes:

Place is physical, being the limits of the thing containing
within which the thing contained is contained. The air, for
example, contains and the body is contained, but not all of the
containing air is the place of the contained body, but only
those limits of the containing air which are adjacent to the
contained body. And this is necessarily so, because the thing
containing is not in the thing contained.

However, there is also an intellectual place where the
intellectual and incorporeal nature is thought of as being and
where it actually is. There it is present and acts; and it is not
physically contained, but spiritually, because it has no form to
permit it to be physically contained. Now, God [...] is not in
a place. For He, who fills all things and is over all things and
Himself encompasses all things, is His own place. However,

God is also said to be in a place; and this place where God is
said to be is there where His operation is plainly visible. Now,

He does pervade all things without becoming mixed with
them, and to all things He communicates His operation in

Ciostr to Me Thar I Am Mysetf / 605

The cosmic spherogenesis of God at the moment of completion. The persons are
reabsorbed by the structures

606 / Bubbles

accordance with the fitness and receptivity of each in accor¬
dance with their purity of nature and will, I mean to say. For
the immaterial things are purer than the material and the
virtuous more pure than such as are partisan to evil. Thus, the
place where God is said to be is that which experiences His
operation and grace to a greater extent. For this reason,
heaven is His Throne The Church, too, is called the
place of God, because we have set it apart for His glorification
[...]. In the same way, those places in which His operation is
plainly visible to us, whether it is realized in the flesh or out of
the flesh, are called places of God. 56

Therefore, places of God—in non-theological terms, places of
co-subjectivity or co-existence or solidarity—are not things
that simply exist in the external space. They only come about
as sites of activity of persons living together a priori or in a
strong relationship . Hence the answer to the question “Where?”
in this case is: in one another. Perichoresis means that the
milieu of the persons is entirely the relationship itself. The per¬
sons contained in one another in the shared space locate
themselves in such a way that they illuminate and pervade and
surround one another, without being harmed by the clarity of
their difference. One could say that they are as invisible as air
to one another—but an air in which they lie for one another;
each one inhales and exhales what the others are—the perfect
conspiration; each breaks forth from Himself into the others—
the perfect protuberance. They provide neighborhood for one
another—the perfect being-surrounded. Thus the Christian
God—together with the Platonic universe—would be the only
being with magnitude, but no surroundings, because He

Closet lo Me Thar t Am Myself / 607

Himself supplies the Around in which He self-referentially acts
out His multi-related nature. So this God would perhaps not be
worldless, but certainly environment-less. 57

Whoever began to exist as this God does would not have to
start with being-in-the-world; for pure relationships would
already constitute a world before the world. External conditions
would never be the first data, and even the world as a whole
would not be given any earlier than the complicity between
those initially united; no thing could be given separately for
itself; every gift would always already, and always only, be an
addition to the relationship. That the totality of conditions
known as “world” can exist at all is itself only a consequence of
the primal gift of belonging-to-one-another. Theologians called
this—with reference to the third person, who acts a priori as the
copula or the spirit of community—the donum deu The gift that
gives the relationship is—to use an ominous modern term—
immanence. Someone lives immanently if they know how to
remain ( manens ) in the inside (in) for which the strong rela¬
tionship makes room. It would be a misconstrual of this
inhabitation and remaining in one another, however, if one
simply took it as a calm state—as the later Latin translation of
perichoresis into circuminsessio , a sort of mutual sitting-in,
suggests. The earlier Latin version of this artificial word, circum -
inccssioy emphasizes the dynamic character of the interpersonal
relations, and was sometimes also equated with a mutual
pushing forward or storming into one another. 58 This word
highlights with greater psychological realism—assuming that
psychology is not out of place among divine persons—the invasive
sense of the influx of each into the others.

Closer to Me Than : Are Myself / 609

[♦V *

Apocalypse of the Trinitarian sphere as a symbol of cosmo-personal ism

610/Bubbles

The characteristic of living together or in one another in the
strong sense or a priori does not only belong to the intra-godly
persons, but also manifests itself, in a sense, in human associa¬
tions of persons. Families and peoples in their historical
reproductions create and inaugurate the place in which their kin
can learn to be themselves by distinguishing themselves from
their ancestors and descendants. It is therefore significant that the
emergence of the Son from the Father, theologically termed
begetting, is the sensitive point in the intra-godly game. For what
is Trinitarian theology other than the most sublime form of a
generational theory? The Victorine Richard—whom medievalists
consider one of the subdest thinkers of the twelfth century—
stated this in an explicit analogy:

For a (human) person proceeds from another person, in some
cases only directly, in some cases only indirectly and in some
cases directly and indirectly at once. Jacob, like Isaac, proceeded
from the substance of Abraham; but the procession of the one
occurred only indirectly, while that of the other occurred only
directly. For only through Isaacs mediation did Jacob spring
from Abrahams loins [...]. Consequently, in human nature the
procession of the persons encompasses three distinct modes.

—And even if this nature seems very far from the unique and
most excellent nature of God, there is nonetheless a certain
resemblance [...]. 59

The cohabitation of younger and older persons causes a constant
regeneration of the place in which the different parties practice
being in and proceeding from one another. Because tribes and
peoples can be devastated by traumatizing magic and political

Closer to Me Than I Am Mysotf / 611

pestilence, however—and in such ways that their distant descen¬
dants will still stumble over the ills of their ancestors—
monitoring or adjusting the procession from the Father to the
Son through the Spirit is simultaneously an indispensable critical
theory of the generational process. The Spirit—that is, the life-
giving knowledge and mutual love between the older and the
younger—is the norm of mental transference from one genera¬
tion to the next. Aside from that, the Spirit—in the view of
theologians—must not be identified simply as the grandson of
the Father; then the Son would move up to the paternal position
and the grandson, as a second-degree son, would be back-to-back
with His grandfather. Then great-grandchildren would also come
into view, creating a leak in the triad and breaking it up into an
inexorable sequence of further begettings. In intra-Trinitarian
fashion, the Spirit is meant to complete the liaison between
Father and Son—and its breathing by the Father and the Son
seals the absolute conclusion of the internal processions. A
transition to a fourth party would be impossible in this imma¬
nence . 60 The number four would be the start of a chain reaction
of processions from God: it would send the generational reactor
out of control, and the first cause could no longer repeat itself
identically, or at least sufficiently similarly, in the effects it would
have on more distant degrees. This would potentially and actually
cause a degeneration of intra-godly events; externality would
triumph over the vigorously self-differentiating inside; Gods
process would become monstrous, and his capacity to communi¬
cate with Himself in forms of strong relation could no longer
curb the tendency towards processions into the dissimilar. In the
centra] Trinitarian process, consequently, the breathed person,
who guarantees unity and similarity between the first, the second

612 /Bubbles

and itself, must form the final part. The Spirit, understood as
amor , condilectio , copula and connexio , ensures that begetting
causes a beneficial difference which remains in the continuum
and does not lead to estrangement or degeneration.

In the generational processes of peoples, however, this rule is
chronically violated; here, offspring very often means a degenera¬
tive continuation of the chain of life—the failed generation is
an unpleasant begetting. It breaks open fatal gaps between the
age groups; the earlier and later generations genuinely become
alien or monstrous to one another. With reference to the dis¬
torting and de-animating actual procreations, the old church
was entirely right to break away from the peoples and their
forced union in the Roman Empire through a pneumatic seces¬
sion, establishing a new regenerative generational process in a
pneumatic or baptismatic people. The generations of the
church members are spiritual generations that set themselves
apart from the biological-cultural generations. Idealistically
put, the children of the Christian people would be the descen¬
dants of a spiritual stream of love that seeks to act as a corrective
for an inadequate empirical form of parental love. This is
simultaneously the critical sense of early Christian chastity:
better to produce no offspring than failed offspring. While the
history of actual generations over the last millennia is largely
the history of unwelcome humans, the history of spiritual
generations keeps itself on the right track as the strength to
welcome to being, in the name of a superhuman authority,
individuals who are ill-greeted by humans. Christianity would
never have survived forty generations or two millennia without
performing its latent function, that of a sewage treatment plant

Closer to Me Than I Am Myse-f / 613

for generativity, with some degree of success. This function has
increasingly slipped out of its grasp since the birth of modern
civil societies, however, and nation-state society, with its educa¬
tional system and its therapeutic subcultures, has largely
emancipated itself from the inspiratory services of the Christian
churches. The generative processes in modern social systems have
become too complex for religious authorities to play more than
a marginal role in them. The institutional churches themselves,
both the reformed and the Roman, have meanwhile taken on
more of a subcultural character; they have primarily become
filtering systems for their own offspring, and have forfeited their
task of moderating the amorous processions in natural societies.
To most people today, their welcomes seem more like disinvita-
tions, and the general crisis of fatherhood has deprived the patres
of most of the authority their office once held. Modern political
mothering agencies have long had far better material and medial
resources than the churches; the rest is self-referentiality. On a
subsidized stage, it is not easy for a pantomime of childlessness
and contempt for daughters to stay on the program. Even the fall
of Rome occurs twice, it seems, and here—as elsewhere—the
first time is a tragedy, the second a farce . 61

At its medieval zenith, Trinitarian theology had led—as we have
attempted to show through perspectival abbreviations—to the
discovery of a language for the strong relationship. The partners of
the immanent Trinity produce, harbor and surround themselves
in such close reciprocity that their intertwinement exceeds all
external conditions. Here one can see the reward for absurdity:
for the first time, being-in-relation can be addressed as an
absolute place. Whoever lives in such total relationships as,

614 / Bubbes

according to the Trinity-logical depiction, the Father, Son and
Spirit do is, in a newly clarified sense, unconditionally inside.
Being-in means existing —or, as medieval authors strangely yet
understandably say with the same intention, inexisting —that is,
in a sphere which is originally opened by internal relationships. 62
In spherological terms, speculation on the Trinity is informative
primarily because it developed the phantasm of never-being-
able-to-fall-out-of-the-inside-position to its ultimate conclusion.
It is inspired by a fanaticism of immanence for which there is
simply not meant to be any outside. In this respect, Trinitarian
theology acts as a logical application form for membership in an
absolute inner world on the model of the exemplary three: by
declaring my allegiance to the deus unitrius , I apply for admission
to a community that rests on indestructible immanence. And yet,
this intimate community too is constituted like a group that
owes most of its cohesion to external compulsion. Perhaps the
curias teacherly statements on the Trinity sound increasingly
mechanical because, with the establishment of the great theological
sums, the intellectual tension began to disappear from the
Trinitarian motif and the hour of the confessional administrators
had come. At the Council of Florence in 1442, in the papal bull
on the union of the Catholic Church with the Copts and
Ethiopians, the coinherence of the divine persons was only
referred to in conceptually empty officialese:

Because of this unity the Father is entire in the Son, entire in
the Holy Spirit; the Son is entire in the Father, entire in the
Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is entire in the Father, entire in the
Son. No one either excels another in eternity, or exceeds in
magnitude, or is superior in power. 63

CIQ38' to Me Thar.! Am Mvselt / 615

Whoever declares this joins a faith with a communional
phantasm of inseparability in effect at its center. The price of
this phantasms formulation is that whoever does not profess
the same is ejected from the communion; it is no coincidence
that the passage quoted is followed by pages of lists detailing
heretical teachings whose originators and followers are anathe¬
matized and cursed. 64

It is clear from this how all attempts to elevate microspheric
intimate structures—of which the Christian Trinity may be the
most sublime formulation—to the norm or the central icon for
large communities involve a high psychopolitical risk: if inclu¬
sion fails, the non-integrable face the threat of elimination. The
primal ecclesiogenic fantasy of stretching an intimate bubble to
the size of the world may give the faithful hope that one day,
everything they now encounter as a hostile and self-centered
outside will be disarmed and incorporated into their own circle
of life; experiences of communal enthusiasm and solidarity also
have a natural tendency to overflow, and the passing on of
spiritual and caritative advantages need not always result in
harmful expansionism.

Nonetheless, the Christian politics of love communities
displays a paradox that can only be illuminated through funda¬
mental spherological research. The attempt to draw the outside
world comprehensively into the bubble leads to errors of format
that will be discussed. What Ernst Bloch called the “spirit of
utopia” gives the greatest possible format error its official title: for
nothing misjudges the autonomous laws of micro- and macros¬
pheres alike as much as the attempt to turn the whole dark,
overpopulated world into a transparent and homogeneous home
for all without further ado.

616 / BwObies

The large spheres will be addressed in the second volume of
this book. It will set out to show how being-in on a small scale
returns as a political and cosmic relationship through specific
mechanisms of transference. If there is one aspect of Blochs
messianic motifs that can accompany us in this transition, it is
above all his idea of exodus. Its light reveals how the ecstatic
animals emerging from microspheres behave when, through
their ability to transfer spaces, they cross over to the larger and
largest scale.

Closer to Me P’an I Am Mvs&f / 617

Excursus 10

Matris in gremio 65
A Mariological Cricket

Unpleasant begetting—this key phrase demands a commen¬
tary. 66 The Old European clerical and monastic system would
be unimaginable without a severe anti-reproductive affect.
Lotario de Segni (c. 1160-1216), head of the Catholic Church
from 1198 as Pope Innocent III, struggles to contain his
righteous nausea when he imagines the nourishment of the
child in the womb:

But notice what food the fetus is fed in the womb: with
menstrual blood of course, which ceases in the woman after
conception so that with it the fetus is fed inside the woman.
This blood is said to be so detestable and unclean that “on
contact with it crops do not germinate, orchards wither,
plants die, trees drop their fruit; if dogs eat of it, they are
transported into madness. 67

How should one imagine the incarnation of God under such
auspices? Marys conception of the God-man as a virgin only
fulfills half of the purity regulations; considering the usual
infernal menu inside the mother, it is clear that Jesus must also

be kept on a different diet in gremio. In Question 13 of the
third book of Summa Theologies Thomas Aquinas considers
whether it would have been better if the body of Christ, like
that of Eve, had been miraculously formed from that of man.
Why did he have to take upon Himself that macabre procedure
of formation through maternal blood? If He had to be born of
woman, was it really necessary to be born of womans blood
too, not after the familiar model of removing a rib? Thomas
reflects that the body of Christ should be formed, down to the
last detail, in exactly the same way as those of other humans:

But other mens bodies are not formed from the purest blood
but from the semen and menstrual blood. Therefore it seems
that neither w*a$ Christ’s body conceived of the purest blood
of the Virgin. 68

But without a blood distinct toto caelo from the common, grue¬
some menstrua, the formation of the God-mans body is
fundamentally unjustifiable. Thomas does concede—less
crudely than Lotario—that even among ordinary women,
embryos are probably formed from a somewhat better blood
than the menstrual; but even this better would have been inad¬
equate to produce Christs body, as it tends to become impure
through mixture with the mans semen. The Jesuan commu¬
nion with the mother, by contrast, had to take place in the
medium of a blood that deserved to be termed especially chaste
and pure:

[...] this blood was brought together in the Virgins womb
and fashioned into a child by the operation of the Holy

620/ Suboles

Ghost. Therefore is Christs body said to be formed of the most

chaste and purest blood of the Virgin. 69

It can scarcely be viewed as a coincidence that it was John of
Damascus, creator of the principle of perichoresis, who made
a particularly important contribution to the debate on maternal
blood. In truth, the blood of Mary, even without resorting
to prenatal psychology and nobject theory, is a very media-
theoretically special juice. In the medieval view, children grew
in the womb somehow through a coagulation or concrescence
of the mother s blood; hence the material of the fetus, if not its
form, consisted of pure mother material. So then the body of
Christ too, as a sculpture made of uniquely pure blood, would
be intimately intertwined with the maternal substance through
a material perichoresis. Marys blood is in the Son, and the Son,
formed from blood, is in the mothers blood.

And Hence, it is rightly and truly that we call holy Mary
the Mother of God 70 [...]. In this the Mother of God, in a man¬
ner surpassing the course of nature, made It possible for the
Fashioner to be fashioned and for the God and Creator of the
universe to become man and deify the human nature which He
had assumed. 71

John of Damascus took the idea of the mother-son rela¬
tionships perichoretic nature to its most extreme conclusion in
a delirious passage from his Sermons on the Assumption .
Because perichoresis always implies the priority of the rela¬
tionship over the external place, or because the relationship
itself supplies the place in which the intertwined are located, it
follows that the body of Mary cannot be buried in the usual
fashion after death. To do so would be to permit—even if only

Mars in greiw / 621

Viergc ouvranre, late 14th century, Musee Cluny, Paris

622 / Bubbles

temporarily, until the Resurrection—the earth to become a
barrier between the united persons. In order to defend the
mother-son perichoresis in extremis too, John conceives the
death of Mary as a mystery play of homecoming, letting the
dying mother say to her son:

I give my body to Thee, not to the earth. Guard that which
Thou wert pleased to inhabit and to preserve in virginity.
Take to Thyself me that wherever Thou art, the fruit of my
womb, there I too may be. 1 am impelled to Thee who didst
descend to me. 72

After her death, the Apostles carry the transfigured body of the
Mother of God to a celestial burial place from where, on the
third day, it will ascend to heaven.

The bosom of the earth was no fitting receptacle for the
Lord's dwelling-place, the living source of cleansing water,
the corn of heavenly bread, the sacred vine of divine wine,
the evergreen and fruitful olive-branch of Gods mercy. [...]

It was meet that she, who had sheltered God the Word in her
own womb, should inhabit the tabernacles of her Son. And
as our Lord said it behoved Him to be concerned with His
Father’s business, so it behoved His mother that she should
dwell in the courts of her Son. 73

The proprium of interweaving or contraction theology thus
consists not in giving mortal individuals the prospect of an
eternal life or favorable rebirths, as non-Christian religions have
in numerous cases. The sense of the divine lovers’ co-inhabitation

Malm i gremto / 623

is rather to protect the strong relationship from its negation
through death. Thus the lovers, even if they die after one
another, die into one another; hence they die without touching
the hard ground of any outside. If the primacy of the inside is
firmly established, the absolute intimate sphere even puts the
greatest force of externalization, death, in its place. With the
assumption of the Mother of Christ into the tabernacle of the
transfigured Son, it seems that the path is open for all those to
follow who, through faith, succeed in becoming interwoven
with the Son. What applies to postmortal union, however, is
also true for perichoreses during life. Within certain limits, all
human cohabitation in spaces of closeness is perichoretic, for
the basic law of the soul space and the micro-social space is the
overlapping of individuals into individuals.

One could interpret the assumptionist Marian deliria as the
archetype of the psychoanalytical idea that the descendants
always become the crypts of their parents. What reason is there
not to admit that Mary may have found eternal rest in her great
son, as in a secret tomb? Perhaps only this: in ordinary children,
according to human experience, the unfulfilled lives of fathers
and mothers are laid to eternal unrest.

624 / Bubbles

TRANSITION

On Ecstatic Immanence

Mystical theology and the Trinitarian system provide insight
into the constitution of personal life, which is marked by
dense interweaving; in these micro-universes of Gods intimacy
with Himself and human intimacy with God, everything is
disposed towards interdependence. By virtue of its perichoretic
character, this theology is fundamentally medial; it lives in the
element of strong relationships. Their symbolic form is commu¬
nion as a mode of being, a transaction and a sacrament. The
classical theories of strong relationships therefore have no place
for the idea of the self-determined individual; someone studying
the old texts may have the impression of reading anticipatory
criticisms of the Modern Age from premodern times and retro¬
spective criticisms of modernity from postmodernity. If one wanted
to design societies on the model of the icon of the Trinity, the
result would be vigorously perichoretic social forms along the
spectrum of communes, communitarisms, communisms—from
the communio sanctorum to the idea of the homogeneous outside¬
less world state as the final communal structure—as recently
dreamed up by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his
pentecostal phantasms of the electronic global village.

625

In Being and Time y by contrast, Heidegger contemplates
derelict forms of existential perichoresis. When he writes of
Dasein as being-with that “Being-in is Being-with others,” 1 one
could have the impression that he has in mind a positive theory
of the original communality of Dasein. And a little later, when
he states in his analysis of the “they” [das Man ] that “Everyone is
the other, and no one is himself,” 2 the catastrophe of the strong
relationship idea becomes manifest. How theology can perish—
it is clear to see in this passage. The Trinitarian sphere has fallen
to earth, and there discovers itself as factual existence in the
world. Everyone is the other, and no one is himself: this could
almost be applicable to the persons of the Trinity, and yet it is
only valid for the mutually entangled and individually lost
socialized humans.

Sartre demonstrated how far the implications of this state¬
ment extend in Closed Doors , where a trinity of inauthentic
people spend eternity together in hellish intertwinement. Here
each becomes the sadistic cognizant of the others sham life. But
hell is only really other people when everyone gazes coldly at one
another in their contemptuous mode of being.

Heidegger refrains from such escalations in his “they” analysis.
He speaks—not without a certain proud difference—of the
communal intimate swamps where daily coexistence takes place
as an unassuming being-outside-oneself. If everyone is the other
and no one themselves, a gray perichoresis comes into view that
makes communional optimism, Catholic and non-Catholic alike,
come to nothing. Living in one another in ecstatic immanence:
that is not only the privilege of the holiest three; it is enough to
be a modern, mass-medial person of the male or female variety in
order to blur into one another in gray communions. Heideggers

626/ Bubbles

“they” reveals the other true icon of intimate interweaving; it
brings into view the imprecise interwoven life of the many and
the general commitment to averageness. And yet, even in this
derelict, confused, talked-to-death Dasein, there is still an inex¬
tinguishable sacred remainder. For even in the most banal
existence, there is a togetherness with others that is as antecedent
and immemorial as only the seamless coinherence of Father, Son
and Holy Spirit. Someone is somehow close to someone else at
some time. One can always reckon with some others from the
start, even if their number, status and mindset remain unclear.

These Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the con¬
trary, any Other can represent them. What is decisive is just
that inconspicuous domination by Others which has already
been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with. One
belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power . 3

Thus the miracle of the strong relationship continues incon-
scpicuously in the “they”; fallen from all high heavens, the “they”
is still grounded in a place specific only to itself. If Saint John of
Damascus could declare that God is His own place, the same can
be said of the “they” in the midst of its own kind. In the most
vulgar group, the collective stuck together with its place, the
unconditional inside is present in as real a fashion as it is among
the divine hypostases, who harbor and glorify one another. The
light of the In shines even for the self lost in busyness. Everyday
existence, because it is in the world, is always blessed with an
ecstatic intimacy, even if it is too sluggish to have any notion
thereof. Whoever is in the world inhabits a place in which, by
virtue of the Ins structure, the strong relationship has always

On Ecstatic ImnnarKrce / 627

already asserted its claim. Dasein is itself a place, one that is dis¬
closed through the mutual inhabitation of those confusedly
existing in a state of being-there-with. This place has always
opened up, even if the horizon is only illuminated by the
average, the medial or the vulgar. Just as the mystic is concerned
with his being-in-God, Dasein in the mode of the “they” is eager
to be subsumed by the inconspicuous, the absent-minded and
the non-ascertainable. Even the approximate life ascends to a
heaven, albeit a low one; prominent figures meet in the heaven
of the “they.” While the mystic has relinquished his will so that
God wills in him, for him and through him, the “they” always
finds a way not to have been the one who did it; where someone
did something, no one did it.

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The “they” [...]
is the “nobody” to whom every Dasein has already surrendered
itself in Being-among-one-another . 4

In the light of the preceding remarks, we can now better explain
wherein the magic of Being and Timey which goes beyond all
merely philosophical attraction, lies. If the book, for all its
bleakness, captivates our thought, it is above all because it
repeats the deepest ideas of Christian Gnosis in a perfect
antonym. The perichoresis of the Gospel of John—I am in the
Father and the Father is in me—and the perichoresis of Hei-
degger—no one is themselves and all are among one
another—articulate themselves according to the same model,
even if they produce entirely different results. If these statements
differ in their scope, it is because John speaks for an intimacy
that proclaims itself the mode of being of the heavenly, whereas

628 / Bubbles

Heideggers analysis describes an existence [Existenz] that has
disintegrated into the vulgar medial public realm. Johns state¬
ment conveys a microspheric message that posits an
immeasurable asymmetry between inside and outside; it is
accompanied by the invitation to cross over from the death-laden
outside to the living inside. Heideggers assertion, on the other
hand, has a macrospheric meaning, for it parodies the result of
average socialization in mediatized mass societies: the “they” is
the inhabitant of the macro-world that pays the price for the
symbolic and material comfort of its life form by letting itself be
sucked towards the general emptying of the inner world. Its
inside has turned completely into the outside; the externalities
themselves are now its soul. How, then, could one conceive of a
transition from beingAhey” to an authentic being-oneself?

John of Damascus taught that places of God are those in
which one can experience His operation, physically or spiritually;
by contrast, any ordinarily God-forsaken point in the outside can
become a place of the authentic self in which the “they” surren¬
ders entirely to its abandonment. Though we are created to have
an inner life, we must embrace empty and external things in the
absence of appropriate augmentation; for themselves, the last
humans have become the external ones. Even their intelligence is
now sought in the neurological outside, in a biological apparatus,
the brain, that eludes its owner on all sides.

Heidegger too, if read correctly, no longer invites us—
despite Augustinian assonances—to seek the truth in the inner
person; instead, he calls upon us to become involved with the
monstrousness of the external. His village is a site of the
immense. Like all mouthpieces of the truth, he calls out to the
bystanders to come—yet here, coming no longer means entering

On Sssai:*; Irrmanence / 629

a divine intimate sphere, but rather going out into an ecstatic
provisionality.

Thus the meaning of In changes once more; in the face of the
globalization wars and technological departures that lent the
twentieth century its character, being-in means this: inhabiting
the monstrous. 5 Kant taught that the question humans ask to
assure themselves of their place in the world should be: “What
can we hope for?” After the un-groundings of the twentieth cen¬
tury, we know that the question should rather be: “Where are we
when we are in the monstrous?”

S3Q / Bubbles

Notes

Introduction

1. De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii, 1606, quoted in Alexandre Koyre, From the
Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), p. 47.

2. Alexandre Koyre has pointed out chat this famous statement does not express
Pascals own feelings, but is formulated out of empathy for the worldview of the
libertin , the godless free spirit, who gazes out into a cosmos with neither firmament
nor meaning. Cf. Koyre, op. cit., p. 49.

3. The line is taken from an untitled poem (trans.).

4. Cf. Spheres //, Excursus 5, "On the Meaning of the Unspoken Word: The Orb
Is Dead.”

5. Regarding the concepts of continentcontentum (encompassing/encompassed), cf
Giordano Bruno, Zunegespmche vom unendlichen All und den Welten [Dialogues On the
Infinite Universe and Worlds; original title De linfinito universo et Mondt], ed. Ludwig
Kuhlenbeck (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichc Buchgesellschaft, 1983), p. 32. The con¬
cept-historical point of interest lies in the fact that the modem word ‘continent refers
to the connections between pans of the ground, whereas the classical continent denotes
the outermost layer of the heavens. Curiously enough, die modern term for the
ground is the ‘encompassing, 1 although it has been known since Columbus and
Magellan that the oceans are the encompassing element in the global earth context,
while the so-called continents are encompassed. Anglo-American authors refer, with
justified irony, to the Old European discourses as symptoms of “continental thought.”

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Josefine Nauckhofif, Adrian Del Caro
(Cambridge University Press, 2001)), p. 120.

633

7. Augustine, Confessions , trans. Francis Joseph Sliced & eel. Michael I*. Foley
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackert, 2006), p. 4.

8. ‘According to the rules of art” (trans.).

9. The New International Version is used for all biblical quotations (trans.).

10. Cf. Terry Landau, About Faces (New York: Anchor, 1989), pp. 193fF.

1L In the Kabbalistic tradition, Gods trick was interpreted not so much pneumat¬
ically as graphematically: as a cosmogonic script. Arcane technology thus means
following on from the primordial script. The medieval golem legend directly com¬
bines the motif of the ceramic creation of man with that of animation through the
divine letter. See Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the
Artificial Anthropoid (New York: SUNY Press, 1990). Gotthard Gunther developed
a reflection-theoretical reformulation of the problematic of creation in his essay
“Schopfung, Reflexion und Geschichte” [Creation, Reflection and History], in
which he oudines a metaphysics of the unfinished world; history is understood as a
dimension of incompletion that invites further productions on the basis of previous
ones. "... one has finally (very late) begun to comprehend that history is the phe¬
nomenon that results when man maps his own subjectivity contrapuntally onto the
natural materiality of reality.” (In Beitrage zur Grundlegung einer operationsfdhigen
Dialekttk , voi. 3 [Hamburg: Mciner, 1980], pp. 14-56; here p. 19.)

12. Augustine, Confessions , p. 192 (Book X, V [7]),

13. Cf. Dietrich Mahnke, Leibnizens Synthese von Universalmathematik undIndividual-
metaphysik (Halle: Niemeyer, 1925), p. 418.

14. Cf. PS., Der starke Grand , zusammen zu sein . Erinnerungen an die Erfindung
des Volkes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998). In this lecture, the title formulation is
restricted to the psychopolitical formation of populations in modem nation¬
states. Here, in the spherological context, the formula is assigned its true
theoretical format.

15. Like Heidegger, Sloterdijk here plays on the literal meaning of Dasein (“exis¬
tence”) as “being-there.” It should be noted that as Dasein is also a conventional, i.e.
non-Heideggerian word in German, it is sometimes translated here as “existence”
rather than “Dasein.” Where Sloterdijk uses it in a Heideggerian sense without
directly referring to Heidegger, the German term has been added in square paren¬
theses, while for specifically Heidegger-related uses, the German word has been
retained in keeping with translation conventions (trans.).

634 / Boobies

16. CF. Spheres ll> Excursus 2, "Merdoc racy. The Immune Paradox of Settled Cultures.”

17. Cf. Thomas Macho, Todesmetaphern . Zur Logtk der Grenzerfahrung (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 195-200 and 408-426. “We do not experience death , but we
do experience the dead. Death is not revealed co us in the experience of the dead\ we
only experience the resistance offered by the dead in their pure presence.” (p. 195)
Analogously, Emmanuel Levinas writes: “However, it is not my non-being that
causes anxiety, but that of the loved one [...] What we call, by a somewhat corrupted
term, love, is par excellence the fact that the death of the other affects me more than
my own.” (God, Death and Time [Palo Alto: Stanford University Press], p. 105.)

18. For a spherological theory of mourning cf. Spheres //, Chapter 1, “Dawn of
Distant Closeness: The Thanatological Space, Paranoia and Peace in the Realm.”

19. Hints at an argument that the unfolded field must have five poles are to be
found below in Chapter 6, “Soul Partitions. Angels—Twins—Doubles,” pp. 413fi

20. Franz Kafka, “Leopards in the Temple,” in Parables and Paradoxes , ed. Nahum
N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1961), p. 93.

21. Cf Arinin Prinz, “Medizinanthropologische Uberlegungen zum
Bevolkerungsruckgang bei den Azande Zentralafrikas,” in Curare, Zeitschrifi fur
Ethnomedizin , vol. 9, 3 & 4 (1986), pp. 257ff The author developed the hypothe-
sis that since the seizure of their land by the Europeans, the Azande have been going
through the psychogenous death of their people. For exogenously inexplicable reasons,
their population has shrunk from c. 2 million in 1900 to a little over 500,000, with
a visible tendency towards further decline.

22. For a theory of cultural synthesis through stress co-operations, cf. the significant
study by Heiner Miihlmann, The Nature of Cultures: A Blueprint for a Theory of
Culture Genetics , trans. Robert Payne (Vienna & New York: Springer, 1996).

23. Cf. Peter Daniel, ZAUN. Normen ah Zaun um das jiidische Volk. Zum Phdnomen
der Zeitiiberdauer desJudentums (Vienna: Edition Splitter, 1995). The author places
most emphasis on the people-stabilizing effect of the ritual boundary vis-a-vis other
cultures, while we would speak less of a fence [Zaun] than a tent effect: it is the inter¬
nal existence in the text-supported tent of the ethnosphere that keeps Israel in shape
as an inspiration community throughout the generations.

24. One should perhaps be aware that the word Unding> though normally referring
to something absurd or monstrous (the prefix Un - is often employed in this man¬
ner), has the literal meaning of “un-thing” (trans.).

Notes/635

25. The German word for the amniotic sac, Fruchtblase , literally means 'fruit
bubble.” This connects it explicitly to all other mentions of bubbles (trans.).

26. “Et ita tota theologia in circulo posita dicitur,” Nicholas of Cusas Dialectical Mys¬
ticism: Text ; Translation , and Interpretive Study of De visione dei , cd. & trans. Jasper
Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985), p. 122.

27. We shall explain in Chapters 4 and 5 of Spheres If why it cannot be any other way.

28. Rainer Maria Rilke, Eighth Duino Elegy: “How happy are those tiny creatures
who / continue in the womb which gave them life. / Happy the gnat: even its nup¬
tial dance / is danced within the womb. Womb is all things. / Look at the birds, at
their half-certainty, / who seem to fly with one wing in each world / as if they were
the souls escaping from / Etruscan dead... from one who shares a box I with his own
effigy, at liberty, / reposing on the lid. And how perplexed / must any womb-born
creature feel, who is / obliged to fly thin air. As if in panic / fear they flitter
through that sky...” Duino Elegies y trans. Stephen Cohn (Evanston, IL: North¬
western University Press, 1998), pp. 67ff.

29. C£ Spheres IT Chapter 5, a Deus sive sphaera. On the Deeds and the Suffering
of the Other Center.”

30. Cf. Spheres IT Chapter 6, “Anti-Spheres: Explorations in the Infernal Space.”

31. Cf. Spheres IT Chapter 7, “How the True Spheric Center Has Long-Range
Effects through Pure Media: On the Metaphysics of Telecommunication.”

32. Cf. Spheres If, Chapter 8, “The Last Orb: A Philosophical History of Terrestrial
Globalization ”

33. The original text contains a play on words: der Sache auf den Grund gehen
means “to get to the bottom of the matter,” but the author replaces Grund with
Un-Grundy combining the meaning of the conventional expression with an invo¬
cation of Jakob Boehmes concept of the Ungrund ’ the unfathomable origin and
foundation of being (trans).

34. Cf. Wolfgang Welsch, Vernunji: Die zeitgenossische Vernunftkritik und das
Konzept der transversalen Vernunji (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996),

35. Concerning spheropoiesis through the fireplace and the thought figure of
“thermic socialism,” cf. Spheres IT Chapter 2, “Vascular Memories: The Reason for
Solidarity in the Inclusive Form.”

636 / Bubbles

36. Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et las reveries du repos (Paris: J. Corti, 1948; reprint
1988), p< 151.

37. Heideggers theorem of existential place is examined more closely below in
Excursus 4, ‘“In Dasein There Lies an Essential Tendency towards Closeness.’”

38. Friedrich Wilhelm Heubach, Das bedingte Leben. Entwurf zu einer Theorie der
psychchlonschen Geqensuindlichkett der Dime. Ein Beitrae zur Psychologic des Alltags
(Munich: Fink, 1987), p. 163.

39. The German word for “I” [ich] is the same as Freuds "ego” [ das Ich)> while the
word for “it” [es] corresponds to the “id” [das £>]; chough the Freudian terms have
usually been chosen elsewhere, it was decided in this case that they are used in their
conventional pronominal sense rather than their psychoanalytical one. It is nonethe¬
less worth bearing this overlap in mind, not least because the ordinary meaning is
still visible whenever these words are used in German (trails.).

40. This does not preclude elegant combinations between advanced theories and
demonological language games; cf. Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual Technology
and the French Postmodern (New York: New World Perspectives, 1992), especially the
foreword, pp. 1-3: “virtual reality is what the possessed individual is possessed by.”

41. Cf. Chapter 7> “The Siren Stage: On the First Sonospheric Alliance. 11

42. Bachelard, op. cit., pp. 124 & 150.

Chapter 1

1. Vol. 1, p. 168, quoted in Heinrich Schipperges, Die Welt des Herzens. Sinnbild,
Organ undMitte des Menschen (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1989), pp. 63f.

2. Cf. Guido Rappe, “ Kokoro —Versuch einer Annaherung an des Verstandnis des
Herzens in Japan,” in Das Herz im Kulturvergleicb , ed. Georg Berkemer & Guido
Rappe (Berlin: Akademie, 1996), pp. 41-69, and Karlfried Graf Diirckheim, Ham;
The Vital Center of Man, trans S. M. Kospoth & E. R. Healey (Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions, 2004).

3. Cf. Paul-Emile Victor, Boreal (Paris: Grasset, 1938).

4. The first and ninth stories of the fourth day.

5. Cf. Jacques Attali, Lordre cannibale: Vie et mart de la medecine (Paris: Grasset,
1979), esp. pp. 21-36.

Notes / 637

6. Raymond of Capua, The Life of Si, Catherine of Siena, traits. George Lamb (New
Providence, NJ: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), pp. 164f

7. The word Intimzone can also be used to mean “genital area” (trans.).

8. We recall Daniel Paul Schrebers account, in his Memoirs of my Nervous Illness , of
how he was penetrated by divine “rays” and temporarily believed that he no longer
possessed any lungs.

9. Raymond of Capua, The Life of St Catherine of Siena, p. 148.

10. Marsilio Firino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love\ trans. Sears Reynolds
Jayne (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 1985), p. 161.

11. Concerning Plato’s studies in radiation, cf. Spheres II, Chapter 5, “Deus sive
sphaera” and Chapter 7, “How the Pure Means Enables the Spheric Center to Have
Long-Distance Effects.”

12. loan P Coulianos treatment of this is still incomparable in Eros and Magic in the
Renaissance: With a Foreword by Mircea Eliade , trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago &
London: Chicago University Press, 1987). Couliano develops the principle that
what was called magic in the early Modern Age was intended by the respective
authors simply as applied general eroticism.

13. This theoretical tradition reached an unknown and overlooked peak in Gior¬
dano Bruno's texts De Magia (On Magic) and De vinculis in genere (A General
Account of Bonding), which were not published in English until 1998: Giordano
Bruno, Cause ; Principle and Unity, and Essays on Mage, ed. & trans. Robert de Lucca
and Richard J. Blackwell (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 103-176. Cf. also
in this volume: Chapter 3, “Humans in the Magic Circle: On the Intellectual His¬
tory of the Fascination with Closeness,” esp. pp. 212ff,

14. Henri F. Ellenberger offered impressive resistance to this forgetfulness in his clas¬
sic study The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1981), especially in his account of Mcsmer and
his successors. We will refresh our memory of the magnetopathic formation of the
psychology of the unconscious in the chapter after next.

15. Cf Manfred Frank, “Steinhere und Geldseele, Ein Motiv im Kontexc,” in Das
kalte Herz, Texte der Romantik (Frankfurt: Insel, 1978), pp. 253-387.

16. Julien OfFray De La Mettrie, Man a Machine (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1943),
pp. 129f.

638/Bubotes

17. Cf. Richard von Diilmen, Theater des Scbreckens. Gerichtspraxis undStmjrituale
in der fruhen Ncuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985).

18. Cf. von Diilmen, pp. 128f

19. Concerning the role of the heart in Aztec culture, cf Georg Berkemer, “Das
Hcrz im aztckischen Opfer,” in Das Herz im Kulturvergleich , pp. 23-29.

20. Regarding the concept of position spatiality and its constitutive role in the
modern conception of the world, cf. Spheres 11, Chapter 8, “The Last Orb: A
Philosophical History of Terrestrial Globalization,” as well as the necessary ref¬
erences to the explication of the term in Hermann Schmitz System of
Philosophy,

21. La Mettrie, Man a Machine , p. 128.

22. Cf. Eric Alliez, “Deleuzes Virtual Philosophy,” in The Signature of the World, Or,
What Is Deieuze and Guattaris Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert & Alberto
Toscano (London Sc New York: Continuum, 2004).

Chapter 2

1. Michel Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” in Essential Works of Michel Fou¬
cault, 1954-1984, voi 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion
(New York: The New Press, 1998) p. 162,

2. Cf. Chapcer 1, “Heart Operation, Or: On the Eucharistic Excess,” pp. lOOff.

3. Cf Chapcer 7, “The Siren Stage: On the First Sonospheric Alliance.”

4. Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus , trans. Benjamin Jowett (Mineola, NY: Dover,
1995), p. 65 (251, a-b).

5. Cf. Giuseppe Basile, “La Cappella degli Scrovegni e la cuitura di Giotto,” in Giotto,
La Cappella degli Scrovegni a cura di G, B. (Milan: Electa, 1992), p. 13.

6. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints , trails. William
Granger Ryan, voL 2 (Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 151.

7. Ibid., p. 152.

8. Rudolf Kassner, Physiognomik (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1951), p. 182.

Notes / (33Q

9. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis , trans. Donald Sheehan & Olga Andrejev (Cress-
wood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), p. 67.

10. Information about the imagologies of Islam can be found in the writings of
the French Islamic scholar Henry Corbin, especially The Man of Light in Iranian
Sufism , trans, Nancy Pearson (New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1994).

11. Cf. Boris Groys, Kunst-Kommentare (Vienna: Passagen, 1998), pp, 119f.

12. For documents of this clarification process, cf. in particular Gottfried
Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum . Ober den Ursprung der Portrait-Malerei in der
italienischen Renaissance (Munich: Pres tel, 1985); Hans Belting, Bild und Kult.
Eine Geschichte des Btides vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1990); and Jean-Jacques Courtine Si Clattdine Haroche, Histoire du visage\
Exprimer et taire ses emotions (XVI-XJX siecle) (Paris: Rivages, 1988).

13. In one of the most significant attempts at a philosophy of the face in recent
years—“Vision und Visage, Oberlegungen zu einer Fazinationsgeschichte der
Medicn,” in Wolfgang Muller-Funk 6c Hans Ulrich Reck (eds), Inszenierte Imag¬
ination . Beitrdge zu einer historischen Anthropologie der Medien (Vienna & New
York: Springer, 1996), pp. 87-108—Thomas Macho emphasizes that to be worthy
of depiction, a face must eo ipso be that of a dead person: an ancestor, a past
ruler or God, Against this background, the Jesuan Ecco homo would then mean:
“Recognize in this living man the one who will become God after his killing.”

14. As far as we know, this term was coined by Gilles Deleuze and F£lix Guat-
tari, who outline a theory of the historically contingent visageite of European
individuals in Chapter 7 of A Thousand Plateaus , trans. Brian Massumi (London
& New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 185-211.

15. In Heideggers sense of Ltchtung (trans.).

16. Deleuze 6c Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus^ p. 196.

17. The—in our opinion—correct counter-thesis to Deleuze/Guattari is posited
by Fran<;oise Frontisi-Ducroux in her book Du masque au visage. Aspects de Viden-
titeen Grece ancienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 21: “The face is undoubtedly
a universal reality, perhaps even an invariant. In all climates and all societies,
whatever the nature of their culture, people always have what we call a face. It is
not certain, however, that all languages have a specific term for it.”

18. Cf. Rudolf Bilz, “Ober das emotionale Partizipieren. Ein Beitrag zum Prob¬
lem des Menschen in seiner Umwelt,” in Die unbewdltigte Vergangenheit des

640 / Bubbles

Memchengcschlechts . Belt rage zu einer Paiaoanthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1967), pp. 39-73.

19. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza , trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Zone Books, 1990).

20. A particularly good example is Hermann Timm; in his book Von Angesicht
zu Angesicht. Sprachmorphische Anthropologie (Giitersloh: Mohn, 1992), influ¬
enced by Lavater, Rudolf Kassner and Max Picard, he attempts to satisfy his
theological interest in “facial epiphany” directly. The flamboyantly witty disser¬
tation of his student Klaas Huizing, Das erlesene Gesicht. Vorschule einer
physiognomischen Theologie (Gutersloh: Mohn, 1992), pursues a similar line.
Both books offer typical Munich examples of the theological turn in phenome¬
nological thought; they demonstrate an alliance for the underestimation of the
difficulties faced by a h is torico-anthropologic ally founded theory of faciality.
One can gain further insight into these difficulties from Deleuze/Guattari (cf.
note 14) and Macho (cf. note 13).

21. Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Eragmente, vols. 1-4 (Winterthur:
Steiner, 1775-78), vol. 1, p. 159.

22. The phrase “worJdless openness to the world” [weltbse Weltoffenhcit\> coined
by Thomas Macho in his essay “Musik und Politik in der Moderne,” in Die
Wiener Schule und das Hakenkreuz , ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal Edi¬
tion, 1990), p. 134, was also taken as a basis for my text “1st die Welt verneinbar?
Ober den Geist Indiens und die abendlandische Gnosis” in the book Weltfremd-
heit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), pp. 212-266.

23. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire , trans. Martin Turnell (New York: New
Directions, 1967), p. 16.

24. Cf, Spheres ll. Chapter 7, “How the True Spheric Center Has Long-Range
EfFeccs through Pure Media: On the Metaphysics of Telecommunication.”

25. Concerning the Greek understanding of faciality, cf. Fran$oise Froncisi-
Ducroux, Du masque au visage.

26. A description of this theorem can be found in Excursus 9, “Where Lacan
Starts to Go Wrong,” pp. 533-538.

27. Cf. Thomas Macho, “Vision und Visage.”

Notes / 641

Chapter 3

1. Cf Bela Grunberger, Narziss und Amtbis. Die Psychoanalyse jenseits der Iricbtbeorie
(Stuttgart: Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 189-205, where
the term “monad” stands for the “extrejected uterus” in which the newborn exists in
closest community with its mother. It lives “in a kind of virtual space [...] that I call
the monad. The monad is an immaterial womb that nonetheless functions like a real
one” (ibid., p. 192).

2. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love , pp. I60f.

3. Ibid., p. 164.

4. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority , trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1979). In the section
“Filiality and Fraternity,” he writes: “The son resumes the unicity of the father and
yet remains exterior to the father: the son is a unique son. Not by number; each son
of the father is the unique son, the chosen son, [...] The paternal era first invests
the unidty of the son; his ego qua filial commences not in enjoyment but in elec¬
tion" (p. 279). This ethics of the father’s child reads like the original psychoanalysis
minus the theory of neuroses.

5. Giordano Bruno , ed. Elisabeth von Samsonow (Munich: dtv, 1999), pp. 115-228.
The English translation in Cause, Principle and Unity is based on a different version of
the text, so the page numbers from the German edition have been retained here (trans.),

6. Concerning the motif of the “other shore” in this "American studies of wishes,”
cf. Spheres IL Chapter 8, “The Last Orb: A Philosophical History of Terrestrial
Globalization."

7. Cf. Rene Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford & New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000).

8. In the sense of being possessed (trans.),

9. To pin down the bloom of the first depth-psychological classicism with symbolic
dates, one could take Mesmers move from Vienna to Paris in 1778 as the beginning
and 1856, the year in which the final sum of magnetopathic traditions, Carl Gustav
Cants’ Ober Lebensmagnctismus und die magischen Wirkungen uberhaupt was
published, as the end.

10. Quoted in Emil Schneider, Der animale Magnetismus. Seine Gescbichte und seine
Beziehungen zur Heilkunst (Zurich: Lampert, 1950), pp. 338-347.

642 f Buobles

11. Immanuel Kant, “On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by
Sheer Resolution* A letter in reply to Privy Councillor and Professor Hufeland " in
The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln 6c London: University
of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 175-181.

12. Cf. by that author “Ideen und Erfahrungen uber den thierischen Magnetism us,”
in Jabrbucher der Medicin als Wissenschafi 2 (1806), pp. 3—46.

13. Cf. by that author Versuch, die scheinbare Magie des thierischen Magnetismus aus
physiologischen und psychischen Gesetzen zu erkldren (Stuttgart & Tubingen: J. G.
Cotta sche Buchhandlung, 1816), as well as Mysterien des innertn Lebens ,. Hegels
Ansichten iiber den thierischen Magnetismus. Ansichten und Gegenansichten von Strauss
und Fichte (Tubingen: Guttenberg, 1830).

14. Cf. Gesammelte Schriften zurphilosophischen Anthropologic, ed. Franz Hoffmann
(Leipzig, 1853; reprint Aalen: Scientia, 1987).

15. Vierzig Sdtze aus einer religiosen Erotik (Munich: Georg Franz, 1831), p. 185.

16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827-8*
rrans. Robert R. Williams (Oxford & Nov York: Oxford University Press, 2007),
pp. 124-139.

17. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle ofSufficient Reason,
and on the Will in Nature ; Ttvo Essays , trans. Madame Karl Hillcbrand (New York:
Cosimo, 2007), p. 332.

18. Concerning Balzac’s esoteric spherology, cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac (Bonn:
Friedrich Cohen, 1923), pp. 37-72; also Burkhart Steinwachs, “Die Bedeutung des
Mesmerismus fur den franzosischen Roman um 1830,” in Franz Anton Mesmer und
der Mesmerismus , ed. Gereon Wolters (Constance: Universitatsverlag Konstanz,
1988), pp. 107ff.

19. Thus the heading of Chapter 3 of Hufeland s Ueber Sympathie (Weimar, 1811),
pp. 45-142.

20. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827-8 > pp. 126f.

21. With his vitalistic oudook, Hufeland stands in the tradition of idealistic and early
Romantic natural religion. Holderlin provided a classical formulation of its principle
in Diotimas meditation on death from the novel Hyperion , or. The Hermit in Greece.
11 —-if I become a plant, would that be so great a loss?—l shall be. How should I be lost
from the sphere oflife, in which eternal love, common to all, holds all natures together 1

Notes /643

[...] We die that we may live. (...] Natures live together, like lovers (...]” (Hyperion and
SelectedPoemsy ed. EricL. Santner [New York: Continuum, 1990], p. 123).

22. Nietzsche, The Cay Sciences p. 110.

23. Cf. Tagebuch uber den animalischen MagnetismuSy in Johann Gottlieb Fichtes
nachgelassene Werkey ed. I. H. Fichte (Ponn: Adolph Marcus, 1835), vol. 3, p. 331.

24. For information on the period in which Berlin, after Vienna and Paris, had
become the third capital of the magnetoparhic movement, cf. Walter Artelt, Der
Mesmerismus in Berlin (Mainz: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der
Literatur, 1965).

25. Cf, the reproduction ofWolfarts baquet, p. 229.

26. The course of the inquiry is described by Henri F. Ellenberger in The Discovery
of the UnconsciottSy pp. 65ff., and in greater detail in Emil Schneider, Der animale
MagnetismuSy pp. 202ff. Schneider also discusses (pp. 211-232) the suppressed
special report by the commission member Jussieu, who had reached a positive
assessment of Mesmers methods.

27. Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reasons and on
the Will in Nature ; Two Essaysy p. 358.

28. Thus the critic of magnetism Johann Scieglitz, Royal Great British court physi¬
cian in Hanover, in his pamphlet Oberden tierischen Magnetismus (Hanover, 1814).

29. Concerning the complex of “political magnetism” and Hoffmanns Napoleon
experience, cf. Rudiger Safranski, ETA, Hoffmann, Das Leben eines skeptischen
Phantasten (Munich & Vienna: Hauser, 1984), pp. 294-310.

30. Friedrich Gundolf, “Das Bild Georges, 1910,” in Gundolf, Beitrdge zur Literatur-

und GeistesgeschichtCy ed. Victor A. Schmitz & Fritz Martini (Heidelberg: L.
Schneider, 1980), pp. 140 l47f.

31. A reference to the German folk song “Die Gedanken sind ffei” (trans.).

32. Fichte, Tagebuch uber den animalischen MagnetismuSy p. 315,

33. In her study Das Zweite Gesicht. Qbernaturliche Phdnomene in der Psychoanalyse
(Stuttgart: Kletc-Cotta, I995)> Elisabeth Laborde-Nottale outlines a history of the
interrelations between clairvoyance and psychopathology (pp. 91-105), mentioning
aspects of non-verbal fusionary communication.

644/Bgbolas

34. Cf. below, Excursus 8, “Illiterate Truths: A Note on Oral Fundamentalism,”
pp. 53Iff.

Chapter 4

1. Cf. Max Raphael, Wiedergeburtsmagie in der Altsteinzeit. Zur Geschichte der Reli¬
gion und religioser Symbole\ ed, Shirley Chesney & Ilse Hirschfeld (Frankfurt: S,
Fischer, 1979).

2. Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earthy trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos,
2003), pp. 67-79, especially the section w Nomos as a Fundamental Process of
Apportioning Space” (pp. 78f.).

3. The pre-metaphysical attitude is described impressively by Hans Peter Duerr
in his central theological work Sedna oder Die Liebe zum Leben (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1985).

4. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology
(London: Routledge, 1969), p. 613: “The obscenity of the feminine sex [i.e. sexual
organs] is that of everything which ‘gapes open.’ It is an appeal to being as all holes are ”

5. The reasons chat mystical monisms have nonetheless remained the exception
rather than the rule in the course of discursive history are firsdy the stupidity of
philosophers, which the profane rarely imagine, and secondly the high homosexual
factor of resistance among the wiser representatives of the profession.

6. Concerning the motif of “being in truth,” cf. below, Chapter 8, “Closer to Me Than
I Am Myself A Theological Preparation for the Theory of the Shared Inside,” pp. 539ff.

7. One can see how it is possible to pass by this entirely, not least under the pretext
of presenting a cultural history of the feminine, by reading Barbara G. Walkers more
irritating than useful Womans Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York: Harper
Collins, 1983) in the hope of learning something about keywords such as birth,
fetus, initiation, placenta, return, search, separation, vulva, etc.

8. This imagery is developed extensively in Erich Neumanns book The Great
Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype , trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton University
Press, 1983), a work whose wealth of material at least compensates for its reliance
on absurd consciousness-historical concepts and completely false basic culture-
historical assumptions.

9. Hans Peter Duerr, Der Mythos vom Zivili$ation$prozess y vol 2: Intimitat (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1990).

Notes / 645

10* Thomas Macho, “Zeichen aus der Dunkelheit. Notizen zu einer Theorie der
Psych ose,” in Wahnwelten im Zusammenstoss . Die Psychose ah Spiegel der Zeit , ed.
Rudolf Heinz, Dietmar Kamper & Ulrich Sonnemann (Berlin: Akademie, 1993),
pp* 223-240.

11. Cf. Pope Innocent III, De miseria condicionis humane , trans. Robert E. Lewis
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 100: “But notice what food the
fetus is fed in the womb: with menstrual blood of course, which ceases in the
woman after conception so that with it die fetus is fed inside the woman.” Cf also
Excursus 10, “ Matris in gremio: A Mariological Cricket,” pp. 6l9fF.

12. Vom Dialog, Studien uber den Ursprungder menschlichen Kommunikation und
ihrer Rolle in der Personlichkembildung (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976).

13. Cf. the authors essay “Wo sind wir, wenn wir Musik horen?,” in Weltfremdheit y
pp. 294-325. There the question in the tide [Where are we when we listen to
music?] is answered with two localizing formulas: firstly the dynamic “in the way
there and in the way back,” and later the harmonical “in resonance T

14. This shares certain aspects with my reflections on music in the modern mass media
and tonal populism in “Technologie und Weltmanagement. Obcr die Rolle der Infor-
macionsmedien in der Synch ronweltgesellschaft,” in Medien-Zeit, Drei gegen-
swartsdiagnostische Versuche (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1993), pp. 67-105, esp. pp. 99ff.; cfalso
below, Excursus 8, “Illiterate Truths: A Note on Oral Fundamentalism,” pp. 52 Iff

15. Macho, “Zeichen aus der Dunkelheit,” p. 237.

16. Cf. Michael Hauskeller, Atmospbdren erleben, Phibsophische Untersuchungen zur
Sinneswahrnehmung (Berlin: Akademie, 1995), in pardcular Chapter II1/2, “Der
Gehorraumpp. 102ff

17. Freuds own remarks in the context of analyzing fear and hysterical breathless¬
ness are not suitable as the foundation for a psychological theory of breath due to
their limited scope; cf Studienausgabe, vol. 6: Hysteric und Atemnot (Frankfort: S.
Fischer, 1982), pp. 30ff., 46, l49fi, 231,273.

18. The first quotable statement on the subject would appear to be a fairly recent
one: Jean-Louis Tristani, Lestadedu respir (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1978). As the
title indicates, the author aims for a revision of psychoanalytical stage theory
through the introduction of an independent breath stage.

19. Cf. Kristofer Marinus Schipper, The Taoist Body, trans, Karen C. Duval (Berke¬
ley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 119.

646 / Bubbles

20. Cf. ibid., pp. 120 & 237f.

21. Kan4u , “sweet dew,” is the Chinese name for ambrosia. Compare Tao Te
Cbingy Chapter 32: “When heaven and earth unite, sweet dew will fall ” (Note
from original text.)

22. Ibid., pp. 120f.

23. Tradition has it that Confucius was also bom from a hollow plum tree. Cf.
Schipper, ibid., p. 238.

24. Epistula Apostolorum 13:14.

25. Ronald David Laing, The Facts of Life (New York: Pantheon, 1976), p. 36.

26. A woman says: “My father was there but he was never around.” (Note from
original text.)

27. “As far as I can make out, there is never anything but womb... It is failure to
recognize the world as womb which is the cause of our misery, in large part.” Henry
Miller, “The Enormous Womb,” in The Wisdom of the Heart (New York: New Direc¬
tions, 1960), p. 94. (Note from original text.)

28. Cf. Heinrich Zimmer, Maya—der indische Mythos (Frankfurt: Insel, 1978),
pp. 42f.

29. Salomo Friedlaender, Schopferische Indijferenz , second edition (Munich: Georg
Muller, 1926), p. 22.

30. Ibid., p. 352.

31. Ma Grunbergcr, Narziss undAnubis , vol. 2, p. 207.

32. On fetal psychoacoustics cf Chapter 7, “The Siren Stage: On the First Sonos-
pheric Alliance,” especially pp. 477ff.

33. Ernst Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), p. 1.

34. Werkausgabe, vol. 15 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 13.

35. Eduard von Hartmann, The Philosophy of the Unconscious , vol. 3, William C.
Coupland (London: Routledge, 2001 |reprint]).

Notes / 647

36. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “What Js Metaphysics,” in Basic Writings* ed. D. F. Krell
(London: Roudedge, 1978), p. 105.

37. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans, John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), p. 140.

38. The word translated here as “admission” is Einraumung , whose literal meaning
is an assignment of space [Raum\; this creates an ambivalence between the literal and
figurative meaning in the phrase “admission of space” [Einraumung des Rautns ], In
the translation of Sein und Zeit cited here, the term is rendered as “giving space” or
“making room” (trans.).

39. Heidegger, Being and Time , pp. 79f.

40. The word for “casing” [Gehause] is direcdy related to chat for “house” [Haus]
(trans.).

41. Heidegger, Being and Time , p. 84.

42. In his analytics of place, Aristotle already provided a marvellously explicit
attempt to address the problem of an “existential” topology, even if the being of
“something in something” precisely could not interest him in existential terms.
The fourth book of his Physics contains the following exposition of the eightfold
sense of “in”:

“Next, we had better come to understand in how many ways we use the expres¬
sion ‘One thing is in another.'

“First, there is the sense in which we say that a finger is incorporated in a hand
and, in general, that a part is incorporated in a whole. Second, we also say that a
whole consists in its parts, in the sense chat there is no such thing as a whole over and
above ics parts. Third, we say that ‘manjSarift within animal’ and, in general, that a
species falls within a genus. Fourth, we also say that a genus is included in a species
and, in general, that any pan of the species is included in the definition of the
species. Fifth, we say that health inheres in hot and cold things and, in general, chat
form inheres in matter. Sixth, we say that the affairs of Greece are in the power of the
Persian king and, in general, that things arc in the power of their original agent of
change. Seventh, we say that things are centered in their good and, in general, their
end or purpose. Finally, the most fundamental sense is when wc say that something
is contained in a vessel and, in general, in a place.

“It is not easy to decide whether something can be in itself, or whether nothing
can, in which case everything is either nowhere or in something other than itself.”
(Aristotle, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield [Oxford & New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996], P- 83.)

6*87 Busbes

43. Heidegger, Being and Time , p. 89.

44. This is the case in Heideggers most important Freiburg lecture, “GrundbegrifFe
der Metaphysik. Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit,” given in the winter semester of
1929-1930, Gesamtausgabevok. 29-30, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, second
edition (Frankfurt: Klostcrmann, 1992). The title given on the department notice
board had contained “isolation” [Veretnzelun^ instead of “loneliness” [. Einsamkeit ].

45. The word is used here in the sense of the divine nature embodied in individual
beings (trans.).

Chapter 5

1. [What shall I do without Eurydice? Where shall 1 go without my love?]

2. Ma Grunberger, Narziss undAnubis , vol. 2, p. 195.

3. Ibid., p. 196.

4. Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness* pp. 605-615.

5. Ibid., p. 609.

6. Sloterdijk’s formulation Mit-Gefiihl (feeling-with) is a play on the literal meaning
of MitgefuhL “sympathy” (note that the English word is simply the same in Greek),
to incorporate his concept of the With (trans.).

7. Cf. Chapter 6, “Soul Partitions. Angels—Twins—Doubles,” pp. 4l3f.

8. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias* trans. Columba Hart & Jane Bishop (Mahwah, NJ:
Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 116-124.

9. The word “crossing” is here used in its architectural sense, referring to the square
space (often decorated) at the junction of the four arms of traditional cruciform
churches (trans.).

10. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivtas, p. 67.

11. Cf. also Excursus 10, “ Matris in gremio: A Mariological Cricket,” pp. 6l9ff.

12. One German word for the placenta, and the one used in this sentence, is
Mutterkuchen y “mother cake” (trans.).

Notes / 649

13. Cf. Jacques Gel is, History of Childbirth: fertility. Pregnancy and Birth in Early
Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity. 1991), Chapter 12,
“The Placenta: Double of the Child,” pp. 165-172.

14. Cf. Franchise Loux, Das Kind undsein Korper in der Volksmedizin. Eine historisch-
ethnographische Studie (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1980), p. 118.

15. Cf. G^lis, op. cit., p. 170.

16. Concerning the following, cf Reimar Hartge, “Zur Geburtshilfe und Saugling?-
fursorge im Spiegel der Gcschichte Afrikas” in Curare, Zeitschriftfur Ethnomedizin,
special issue 1/1983, pp. 95-108.

17. This culture-historical connection makes it especially interesting to note what
Harold Bloom observes in his study on the latest American national theosophy,
what he calls “American Orphism”: that its central symbols are the flag and the
fetus. Cf Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Chris -
tian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 45: “The flag and the fetus
together sybolize the American Religion, che partly concealed but scarcely
repressed national faith.”

18. Some translations have “bundle of life” instead of “bundle of the living” (trans.).

19. Curiously enough, it was Rousseau of all people who most clearly informed
Tzvetan Todorov’s attempt to establish a Euro-communitarian ethics. Cf Life in
Common: An Essay in General Anthropology, translated by Katherine & Lucy Golsan
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).

20. The term “loneliness technique” {Einsamkeitstechnik) was, to the best of our
knowledge, introduced by lliomas Macho in a lecture on the cultural history of the
withdrawal from culture entitled “Ideen der Einsamkeit” and given during the
winter semester of 1995-1996 at the Humbolt University in Berlin.

21. That the child in utero is not an immediate part of the mother, but rather lives
in an intermediate world of its own together with the placental double, has—among
other things—dramatic immunological implications. Recent studies seem to have
shown that among pregnant women who were HIV positive, the illness was only
transmitted to the child in 30% of the cases, while the majority profit, in a scarcely
comprehensible manner, from a form of placental guardian angel. From a gyneco¬
logical-obstetric perspective, it remains unclear whether the placenta should be
viewed as an organ of the mother or the child; there is increasing evidence to
suggest the latter, however.

650 / ajbdl&s

22. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus ; trans. David Young (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni¬
versity Press, 1987), p. 81.

23. Cf. Excursus 2, “Nobjects and Un-Relationships,” pp, 29Iff.

24. Cf Boris Cyrulnik, Sous le signe du lien: line histoire mturelle de ^attachment
(Paris: Hachette, 1989).

25. Concerning the complex of precarious cooperation with the status quo, cf.
Sloterdijk. “Was heisst; sich ubernehmen? Versuch iiber die Bejahungin Welt -
fremdheit , pp. 267-293, esp. pp. 286ff.

26. In his parallel life stories, Plutarch presented 23 biographical pairs, including
Pericles/Fabius Maximus, Alcibiades/Coriolanus, Pyrrhus/Marius, Alexander/
Caesar, Dion/Brurus.

27. Cf. Thomas Macho, “Himmlisches Gefliigel—Beobachtungen zu einer
Morivgeschichte der Engel,” in Cathrin Pichler (ed.), :Engel :EngeL Legenden der
Gegenwart (Vienna 6c New York: Springer, 1997), pp. 83-100.

28. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 26.

29. Cf. Heinz Mode, Fabeltiere und Ddmonen in der Kunst. Die fantastische Welt der
Mischwesen (Sruttgart: Kohlhammer, 1974), p. 52.

30. Malcolm Godwin, Angels: An Endangered Species (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1990), pp. 62f.

31. See Chapter 3, “Humans in the Magic Circle: On the Intellectual History of the
Fascination with Closeness,” pp. 207ff.

32. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious , p. 71. Cf. the picture of the magic
elm, p. 408.

33. Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks r, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser 6c
Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991), p. 94.

34. Ibid., p. 96. One could, by way of experiment, map this exclamation by Kafka
onto the final lines of Rilkes The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggr. “He was now
terribly difficult to love, and he felt that only One was capable of it. But He did not
yet want to." (Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Burton Pike
[Champaign 6c London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008], p. 191.)

Notes V -651

Chapter 6

1. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas , vol. 1: God and the Order of Creation , ed.
Anton C. Pegis (Indianoplis: Hackett, 1997), p. 499.

2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, crans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press,
1994), p, xxxvii.

3. Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Flammarion, 1997).

4. Censorinus, The Birthday Book, trans. Holt. N. Parker (Chicago & London:
Chicago University Press 2007), pp. 4f.

3. “In the presence of the people” (trans.).

6. Cf. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827-8 , p. 126, as well as Chapter
3, p. 207ff above (passage ending in note 20).

7. The figure cogttor ergo sum first appears, as far as we know, in Franz von Baaders
metaphysics of knowledge: cogitor a Deo, ergo cogito, ergo sum. Cf Werke, 16 vols.
(Leipzig: Verlag des literarischen Instituts, 1831-60), vol. 1, pp. 370 & 395, and
vol. 12, pp. 238 & 324. The Christian theologian of history and language philoso¬
pher Eugen Rosens took-Huessy drew on related motifs to develop a proccssual
metaphysics of mentioned and named existence. Cf. Die Sprache des Men -
schengeschlechts . Eine leibhafte Grammatik in vter Teilen (Heidelberg: L. Schneider,
1963-64); also Spheres II, Chapter 7, "How the True Spheric Center Has Long-
Range Effects through Pure Media: On the Metaphysics of Telecomm unication.”

8. Kant provides the technical formation of this axiom of potential self-augmentation
through self-observation in his theorem of transcendental apperception; cf Critique
of Pure Reason , trans. John Miller Dow Meiklejohn (New York: Barnes & Noble,
2004), p. 100. In his study “Himmlisches Gefliigel,” p. 94, Thomas Macho refers to
the “self-guardian-angel-1 ike” quality of the Kantian “I think” and Fichte s “intel¬
lectual observation.” For a meditation-philosophical, “Eastern” version of the
self-observation postulate, cf. the work of the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

9. Cf. Dieter l^nzen, Vaterschaft. Vom Patriarchatzur Alimentation (Reinbek: Rowohlt,
1991); on the concept of susciptive fatherhood among the Romans, see pp. 91 fE

10. In a related fashion, Guy de Maupassant’s tale “The Horia” (le hors Id, “the out¬
side there”) describes the infection of a house in Normandy with a demon brought
over from distant South America. Michel Serres developed the space-philosophical
implications of this story in an inspired interpretation: cf. Atlas , pp. 61-85.

652 / Bubbles

11. Cf. Bernard La Font & Henri dc Saint-Blanquat, “Figures de notre absence,” in
Le reveil des anges , messagers des peurs et des consolations {Collection Mutations no.
162), ed. Olivier Abel (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1996), p. 92.

12. Cf. loan P. Culianu, Out of this world: otherworldly journeys from Gilgamesh to
Albert Einstein, trans. (Boston, Shambhala, 1991), pp. 50flf.

13. The second-century revelatory treatise The Shepherd of Hernias features a trans¬
position of the two-genius doctrine into a Christian context: “There are two angels
with a man, one of righteousness and one of wickedness. Trust the angel of
righteousness. But from the angel of wickedness stand aloof [...]” Quoted in Alfons
Heilmann & Heinrich Kraft (eds.), Texte der Kirchenvater, 5 vols. (Munich: Kosel,
1963-66), vol. 1, pp. 254f.

14. Petrus Abaelardus, “In Annuntiatone Bcatae Virginis,” from Lauda Sion , ed. &
trans. Karl Sim rock (Stuttgart: J. G. Cottasche Buchhandlung, 1868). It should be
noted, incidentally, that the command “Be not afraid!” docs not here articulate the
usual tremendum aspect of encounters between humans and the numinous realm,
but must rather be understood as an expression of the precarious cognitive relation¬
ship between the subject and its informant.

15. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas , vol. I: God and the Order of Creation,
pp. 509-537.

16. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers ; trans. Benedicta Ward (Kalamazoo, MI: Cis¬
tercian Publications, 1975), pp. If.

17. Cf. Jean-Louis Chrdtien, “La connaissance angel ique,” in Le riveil des anges ,
pp. 138f.

18. In German, the word Autismus is not only used in the strict clinical sense, but
also to refer more generally to self-absorbed or oblivious behavior (trans.).

19. Iain Gardner & Samuel N. C. Lieu (eds.), Manichean Texts from the Roman
Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 47 & 75.

20. Ibid., p. 49.

21. Die Gnosis , vol. 3: Der Manichdismus, ed, & trans. Alexander BohJig (Zurich &
Munich: Artemis, 1980), p. 78.

22. Ibid., p. 80,

Notes / 653

23. Cf. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. 6c cd. Harry Tucker,
Jr. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 69 & 71.

24. Concerning the modification of prophetic subject structure into an ‘apostolic
pact,” cf. Spheres 11 , Chapter 7, “How the True Spheric Center Has Long-Range
Effects through Pure Media: On the Metaphysics of Telecommunication”

23. Ibid.

26. Cf. Marjorie Wallace, The Silent Twins (London: Chatto 6c Windus, 1986).

27. I attempted to show in my music-philosophical study “Wo sind wir, wenn wir
Musik horen?” ( Weltfremdbeit ; pp, 294—325, especially pp. 294—325) how it is pos¬
sible to reject this mortifying educational demand in favor of a perturbable subject
form that “trembles” to the end.

28. This word was introduced into psychoanalytical terminology by C. G. Jung in
1911, in his text Symbols of Transformation —initially as a discrete instrument for
determining internalized relationships, than as an ideologically agglutinated psycho-
ontological category.

29. Earlier on (in the final section of Chapter 2, “Between Faces,” pp. 139ff.) we pre¬
sented arguments supporting the theory that mirrors only appeared in the time of
advanced civilizations as media of self-relation among the wealthy, powerful and
wise (in the middle of the first century BC), and that it was only in the nineteenth
century, together with the establishment of literacy and hygiene, that the use of
mirrors became widespread among modem populations. In this point, Lacans argu¬
ment of a supposedly constitutive, pre-social “mirror stage” displays a media- and
technology-historical weakness. Whether one could reformulate Lacans hypothesis
with reference to watery reflections or the shadow of the infans is more than uncer¬
tain; what is clear is that semantic deception is going on if the mothers eye is
presented as an organic “mirror” given at all times.

30. Cf. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 612-618.
The American surgeon William P. Pancoast wrote a sensational account of the
separation of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, who died in 1874.

31. Ibid., p. 615.

32. Ibid., p. 617.

33. Ibid,, p. 613.

654 / Bubbles

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., p. 614.

36. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities , trans, Sophie Wilkins & Burton Pike
(New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 984f.

37. Poems and Ballads of Goethe , trans, W. Edmondstoune Aytoun and Theodore
Martin (New York: Delisser & Procter, 1859), p, 215,

38. The classic model of religious “mourning” is provided by Saint Augustine in
Book IV of his Confessions ; see Spheres II, Chapter 1, “Dawn of Distant Closeness:
The Thanatological Space, Paranoia and Peace in the Realm.”

39. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, pp. 26f.

40. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. & trans. James Scrachey et al., 24
vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-1974), vol. 14, p. 245.

41. Ibid., p. 249.

42. Ibid.

43. Cf. above. Excursus 2, pp. 29Iff.

44. Concerning signs of being, cf. Spheres //, Chapter 7, “How the True Spheric
Center Has Long-Range Effects through Pure Media: On the Metaphysics of
Telecommunication.”

45. We owe the term “angeletic” to Rafael Capurro; concerning the history of the
concept of angelia , cf. Capurro, “On the Genealogy of Information,” in Klaus
Kornwachs & Konstantin Jacoby (eds.), Information: New Questions to a Multidisci¬
plinary Concept (Berlin: Akademie, 1996), pp. 259-270.

46. Only Herman Melville, if anyone, could claim to have anticipated—in his 1856
tale Bartlcby —the shift from angeletics to idiocies that Dostoyevsky's novel of
1868/1869 then spectacularly completed.

47. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ* Ecce homo ; Twilight of the idols , and Other Writings ,
trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 28.

48. Ibid., p. 27.

Notes / 655

49. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (Mineola, NY: Dover,
2003), p. 74.

Chapter 7

L Henri Michaux, Selected Writings: The Space Within , trans. Richard £11 mann (New
York: New Directions, 1990), p. 67.

2. Augustine, Confessions , p. 4.

3. There is a play on words here, as the word for “receptivity,” Empfanglichkeit,
is etymologically connected to Empfangnis , meaning (natal) “conception”

4. All instances of the word “movedness” correspond here to Ergriffenheit ; meaning
a state of being emotionally moved, rather than Heidegger s Bewegtheit . The verb
ergreifen also has the more literal meaning “to seize or grab,” which certainly comes
into play here (trans.).

5. The Odyssey of Homer: A New Verse Translation , trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Berke¬
ley & lx>s Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 248f.

6. Homers use of dual verb forms indicates two Sirens; later accounts, as in the
Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, mention three or four figures and even supply
their names: Thelxiope, beguiler of the heart; Thelxinoe, beguiler of the senses;
Molpe, she who dances while singing; and Aglaope, she of the magnificent voice.
Other Siren tercets also include such names as Aglaopheme, the magnificently
famous, and Ligeia, she of the shrill voice.

7. The Odyssey of Homer, pp. 249f.

8. A reference to the aria “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot , popularized by
Luciano Pavarotti.

9. Jean Paul, Titan: A Romance , trans. Charles Timothy Brooks, vol. 1 (London:
Trubner, 1863), pp. 6f.

10. Cf. the words of Odysseus to his comrades about the wise Circes advice: “The
prophecies of Circe are not meant for one or two of us.”

11. “I bring you tidings of great joy” (trans.).

12. Cf. Chapter 2, “Between Faces: On the Appearance of the Interfacia] Sphere of
Intimacy,” pp. 139f.

656 1 Bubbles

13. Cf. Alfred Tomatis, Klangwelt Mutterleib. Die Anfange der Kommunikation zwis-
chen Mutter undKind (Munich: Kosel, 1994), p. 179.

14. The word for “bondage” or “obedience,” Horigkeit , is connected to horen, mean¬
ing “to hear, listen or obey." The sequence of “bondage," “acuteness of hearing" and
“hardness of hearing" thus appears in German as three variations on the same theme:
Horigkeit , Hellhdrigkeit and Schwerhorigkeit (trans.).

15. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth , ed. & trans. Thomas M. Lennon
& Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 113.

16. Ibid., pp. 115f.

17. “Keys" in the musical sense (trans.).

18. Concerning the motifs of the wall and wall-lessness, cf. Spheres II, Chapter 2,
“Vascular Memories: The Reason for Solidarity in the Inclusive Form.”

19. We owe this formulation [originally Ton-Gotter] to Andreas Leo Hndeisen (Insti¬
tute of Cultural Philosophy and Media Theory at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts).

20. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 67f.

21. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in
Merits: A Selection , trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Roucledge, 2001) pp. 1-6. In
keeping with standard usage, the “1” of the English translations title has been
rendered here as “ego” (trans.).

22. Cf. the final section of Chapter 2, “Between Faces,” pp. 139fF.

Chapter 8

1. Heidegger, Being and Time , p. 79; cf also above, Excursus 4, “in Dasein There
Lies an Essential Tendency towards Closeness.'"

2. Gilles Deleuze took a step towards the clarification of this matter in his final text
“Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life , trans. Anne Boyman
(New York: Zone Books, 2001) pp. 25-34.

3. In so far as biblical theology teaches a withdrawn or separate God, the immanence
in Him of all that exists is modified into something that occurs under God, with
reference to God or on the edge o/'God, though never fully outside God. In a sense,

Notes/657

classical theology was the first analysis situs, for all locations in that which exists
constitute situations in relation to the absolute center. Radical ontology is therefore
possible only as situology—and nowhere is this fact manifested more clearly than in
Heideggers early thought; cf. Excursus 4, “‘In Dasein There Lies an Essential
Tendency towards Closeness,’” p. 333, as well as the final connecting chapter “On
Ecstatic Immanence,” pp. 625flf.

4. In the view of classical metaphysics, that is to say absolute situology, God is the
unity of being-with-onesclf and being-oucside-oneself—a trait that can also be
ascribed to finite existence [Dasein] if, in agreement with Heidegger, one under¬
stands it as insistent and ecstatic

5. Alain Badiou, Conditions , trans. Steven Corcoran (London & New York: Con¬
tinuum, 2008), p. 276. It is clear that this is not our own view, as Badious claim
makes excessive concessions to the ideology of prior loneliness.

6. Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, p. 10 L

7. The words translated here as “recognition” and “misjudgment” are Wiedererken -
nen and Verkennung , both based on kennen , “to know” (trans.).

8. Cf. Page DuRois, Torture and Truth (London: Roudedge, 1991).

9. Concerning the motif of “being-in-the-truth” or the return to the “womb of
truth,” cf. Chapter 4, “The Retreat Within the Mother,” pp. 269f.

10. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, “Dialogue on the Hidden God”: “For outside truth there
is no truth [...] Therefore, truth is not found outside truth neither in some way nor
in something else” (extra veritatem non est veritas [...] Non reperitur igitur veritas
extra veritam nec aliter nec in alio), in Selected Spitituai Writings , trans. H. Lawrence
Bond (Mahwah, NJ: Paulisc Press, 1997), p. 210.

11. For a macrospherological interpretation of apostleship, cf. Spheres If, Chapter 7,
“How the True Spheric Center Has Long-Range Effects through Pure Media: On
the Metaphysics of Telecommunication.”

12. Concerning the phenomenon of religious history as a continuation of the evan¬
gelistic process through apostolic history, cf* Chapter 6, note 24.

13. Augustine, Confessions , p. 189 (Book X, II [2]). The formula in te> “in You,”
frequently used by Augustine, refers more to the topological or situological struc¬
ture of the egp-God relationship; in rhe passage nec mihi nec tihi placeam nisi de te y
on the other hand, the phrase de te emphasizes the relationship with ones own ego

6587 Bubbles

in dynamic terms as an international relationship within the relationship to God: if
I am something to myself, it is because l am something to You.

14. Here the author uses Da-Sein rather than Dasein\ cf. Introduction, “The Allies;
or, The Breathed Commune/* note 15 (trans.).

15. Ibid., p. 4 (Book I, II [2]).

16. Ibid., p. 209 (Book X, XXIV).

17. Ibid. (Book X, XXV).

18. Ibid., p. 210 (Book X, XXV).

19. Ibid. (Book X.XXVI).

20. Ibid. (Book X, XXVII).

21. If this were the place to repeat the theological deduction of temporality, the
difference between theodrama (Gods process with the world) and affair (the souls
process with God) would need to be developed; for our purposes it is sufficient to
foreground the aspect of the affair,

22. The original word Kennenlernen means “to become acquainted with”; it is trans¬
lated differendy here because in the German, it refers to the preceding quotation
from Augustine, where the Latin didici is rendered as kennen lernte in the German
translation used by the author, but as “learned of’ in the English translation used
here. It is also worth noting, that the literal meaning of kennenlernen is “to learn to
know” (trans.).

23. Cf. the passage on theotechnics in the Introduction, pp. 31—45.

24. Confessions III, VI (11): “You were more inward than the most inward place of
my heart and loftier than the highest” ( Tu autern eras interior intimo meo et superior
summo meo). This highest claim of Christian topological surrealism is explained with
reference to its architecture-historical preconditions in Spheres II , Chapter 3: “Arks,
City Walls, World Borders, Immune Systems: On the Ontology of the Walled
Space.” Here the comparadve sense of the inside emerges in the light of palace archi¬
tecture in the Persian Empire: the inward is that which, in a system of nested spaces,
lies not simply intus , “inside,” but interior ; “further inside.”

25. Cf. Martin Buber, Ecstatic Confessions , trans. Esther Cameron (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1996).

Notes / 659

26. A reference to the “SWR Teleakademier a television series produced by the
SWR (Southwest German Broadcasting) featuring presentations by university
lectures on different scientific, cultural and social topics (trans.).

27. Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky (Mah-
wah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 83.

28. Ibid., pp. 192f.

29. Ibid., p. 218.

30. Shihabuddin Suhrawerdi Maqtul [Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi], Three Treatises on
Mysticism , ed. & trans. Otto Spies & S. K. Khatak (Bonn: Selbstverlag des Orien-
talischen Seminars der Universitat Bonn, 1935), pp. 25f.

31. Cf. Scyyed Hossein Nasr, Three Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhrawadi ; fhn Arahi
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 76.

32. Alongside Christology, prophetology, pneumatology and onto-semiology, or the
doctrine of signs of being (meaning philosophical aesthetics).

33. Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings, pp. 235IF.

34. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell,
1980), p. 52.

35. In the original, the author comments here on the shortcomings of the German
translation, which renders Cusas contractio as Verschrankung , which normally means
“interweaving or folding”; these remarks have been omitted (trans.).

36. Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings, p. 238.

37. The German word for “guilt” is Schuld and “debts” are Schulden, with the verb
schulden meaning “to owe” (trans.).

38. Concerning the modernization of guilt, cf. Spheres II, Chapter 8, “The Last Orb:
A Philosophical History of Terrestrial Globalization.”

39. Although the author uses verschrdnkt [interwoven] rather than zusammengezogen
[contracted] in these two sentences, he does so with reference to Cusas contractio
and its inadequate German translation (see note 35 above), which is why it is trans¬
lated here as “contracted.”

660/Bubbles

40. Nicholas ofCusa, Selected Spiritual Writings, p. 240.

41. Especially Chapters 5 and 6.

42. Kleine Munze , literally “small coin” or “small change,” is a term from German
copyright law, referring to the minimal unit of creative work subject to copyright
protection (trans.).

43. Cf. Spheres //, Chapter 5, “Deus sive sphaera. On the Deeds and the Suffering
of the Other Center.”

44. Nicholas of Cusa, De ludo gbbt , trans. Pauline Moffitt Watts (New York: Abaris
Books, 1986), p. 75,

45. Pseudo-Dionysius (Areopagita), “The Divine Names,” in The Complete Works ,
trans. Colm Luibheid & Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 6If.

46. Cf. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts , trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Cosimo, 2007), p.
180: “Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world.”

47. Saint John of Damascus, Writings , trans, Frederic H. Chase (New York: Fathers
of the Church, Inc., 1958), p. 178.

48. Ibid., pp. 195f.

49. Cf. Albert Menne, “Mengenlehre und Trim cat,” in Miinchener Theologische
Zettschrifi 8(1957), pp. 180ff.

50. Letter 38, written c. 370, in Saint Basil, The Letters , trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Lon¬
don: Heinemann, 1926), vol. 1, p. 209.

51. Adv. Maced, GNO, 1II/1,109, quoted in Giulio Maspero, Trinity and man: Gre¬
gory of Nyssas Ad Ablabium (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), p. 176.

52. In Das seksame Problem der Weltgesellschaft. Eine Neubmndenburger Vorlesung
(Opladen: Westdcutscher Verlag, 1997), Peter Fuchs provides a brilliant introduction
to sociological systems theory—emphasizing the non-spatial character of “society”—
conveying the impression of attempting to approach a “pcrichoretic” sociology, i.e.
a theory of society without drawing on images of spatial containers.

53. Cf. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Fragments and Testimania: A Text and Translation
with Notes and Essays , ed. & trans. Patricia Curd (Toronto/Buffalo/l-ondon: Uni¬
versity of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 25 (Fragment B12): “This revolution

Notes / 661

(perkhoresis) caused them (the mixed qualities) to separate off. The dense is being
separated off from the rare, and the warm from the cold, and the bright from the
dark, and the dry from the moist. 1 '

54. Saint John of Damascus, “An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” in Writ¬
ings, p. 177.

55. Ibid., p. 202.

56. Ibid., p. 197f.

57. The last few lines of this paragraph play extensively with the prefix urn -, denot¬
ing the meaning of “around”: Umgeben-Sein [being-surrounded], Umfang
[magnitude], Umivelt [environment], das Um [the Around], and finally the pairing
of weltlos [worldless] and umweltlos [environment-less] (trans.).

58. Cfi Cyril of Alexandria, In Johannis Evangetium I, 5. Migne PG, 73, 81; quoted
in Encyclopedic Tbeologique, vol. C, p. 880.

59. Richard of Saint Victor, De trinitate , V, 6.

60. Cf. Richard of Saint Victor, La trinik: Texte Lit in, ed. Gaston Salet, S.J. (Paris:
Les Editions du Cerf, 1959), pp. 342 &c 35 Iff.: quarta in trinitate persona locum
habere non possit. Immanuel Kant’s listless remark that it makes no difference
whether an apprentice of faith believes that God comprises three persons or ten, as
this difference has no effect on his behavior, merely shows that Kant had no idea of
the difference between an ethics of following rules and an ethics of communional
existence. A ren-person godhead would always be monstrous, either because persons
4 to 10, if equal, would simply be serially added or, if unequal, would set off a pro¬
cession into the God-unlike. Cf. The Conflict of the Faculties , p. 67.

61. “Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He
forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Bru -
matre of Louis Bonaparte , trans. D. D. L. (New York & Berlin: Mondial, 2005), p. 1.

62. Cf. Peter Stemmer, “Perichorese. Zur Geschichte eincs Begriffsin Archiv fur
Begriffigeschkhte XXVII (1983), pp. 24-32.

63. Denzinger, 1331; after Fulgentius of Ruspe.

64. Denzinger, 1332-1333, 1336, 1339-1346.

65. “In the mothers lap” (trans.).

662/Bubbles

66. Cf. above, p. 613.

67. Pope Innocent III, De miseria condicionis humane, trans. Robert E. Lewis
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 100.

68. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York: Cosimo, 2007), vol. 4, p.

2182 F.

69. Ibid., p. 2183.

70. The original word is Theotokos , literally “birthgiver of God” (trans.).

71. Saint John of Damascus, “An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” in
Writings, pp. 294f.

72. St. John Damascene, “Sermon II” in On Holy Images, Followed by Three Sermons
on the Assumption, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas Baker, 1898), p. 186.

73. Ibid., p. 191.

Transition

1. Heidegger, Being and Time , p. 135.

2. Ibid., p. 165.

3. Ibid,, p. 164.

4. Ibid., pp. I65f.

5. The uses of “the monstrous” here and in the closing question correspond in the
original to das Ungeheure , and should be taken less in the sense of "atrocious” or
“horrible” than “immense” or "unfathomable” (trans.).

Notes / 663

PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

All other illustrations are from the personal archive of the author and of the
publisher, Suhrkamp,

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology by Peter Sloterdijk"

See other formats